When we think about a patients’ pain and suffering, it’s usually in the context of a disease they are challenged with or things like treatment side effects. But patient suffering could also refer to interactions with their doctor or how they are treated in a hospital in general.
Some doctors are now beginning to recognize how patient care and reducing suffering goes beyond treating diseases, and they are trying to make changes. Competition is a component in the effort, but also recognizing that patients feeling lost in the shuffle, waiting to see a doctor for a long period of time or getting inadequate explanations about their condition are real problems
Dr. Kenneth Sands, the chief quality officer at Harvard’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, told The New York Times that these issues are as important as medication errors, injuries or infections acquired in a hospital.
When Investment Rhymes with Canada
Canada has a proud history of achievement in the areas of science and technology, and the field of biomanufacturing and life sciences is no exception.
One way to make improvements in these areas is by talking to patients and finding out what they would consider suffering, and Dr. Sands and his colleagues decided to do that.
They found several categories. Communications — for example, a doctor blurting out, “Oh, it looks like you have cancer.” Or losing a valuable, like a wedding ring. Or loss of privacy — a doctor discussing a patient’s medical condition where an adjacent patient could hear.
“These are harms,” Dr. Sands said. “They elicit suffering. They can be long lasting, and they currently are largely unquantified, uncounted, unrecorded.”
Patient surveys have been around for decades, and they are another good tool to find out what the patient experience is like, but rarely do they address these kind of suffering issues – at least not explicitly.
Health Benefit Consultants, Share Your Expert Insights in Our Survey
Share some of the trends you are seeing among your clients across healthcare, including chronic conditions, behavioral health, healthcare navigation, and more.
Dr. Michael Bennick, the medical director for patient experience at Yale-New Haven Hospital, noticed a Medicare survey question that asked, Is it quiet in your room at night? Bennick realized this question could essentially be asking, Can you get a good night’s sleep without too many interruptions from things like being woken up to get blood pressure reads or drawing blood.
This led Bennick to change some protocols. If it’s necessary to wake a patient, that makes sense, but otherwise, many of those procedures can be done at the end of the night and in the morning.
“I told the resident doctors in training: ‘If you are waking patients at 4 in the morning for a blood test, there obviously is a clinical need. So I want to be woken, too, so I can find out what it is.’ ” No one, he said, ever called him, and blood draws in the middle of the night completely stopped.
Just by making this change (which didn’t cost a penny) brought his medical unit up from the 16th percentile to the 47th nationally in the Medicare survey.
Surveys aren’t always an accurate assessment, warns Dr. Scott Ramsey, a health care economist and cancer researcher at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. This is primarily because answers could be skewed due to the fact that these patients are counting on the hospital for treatment, so they might not want to stir things up. But generally speaking, getting feedback is great if it leads to change and improvement.
“Every patient visit is a high-stakes interaction,” Dr. Thomas H. Lee, the chief medical officer of Press Ganey – a company that surveys hospital patients, told The Times. “It is a big deal for the patient and it is a big deal for you. And all you have to do is be the kind of physician your patient is hoping you will be.”
