Patient Engagement

Patient experience: Caregiving is all about understanding

"Let's be healthcare receivers and not just providers," said author and cancer survivor Kelly Corrigan, explaining the importance of listening to and understanding patients.

Kelly Corrigan

Here’s the thing about caregiving, professional or otherwise: People genuinely like to feel cared about, as well as cared for.

That was the message from cancer survivor and author Kelly Corrigan, who delivered the closing keynote Friday in Dallas at the Beryl Institute’s sixth annual Patient Experience Summit.

“Humanity more. Tell me more. Make people feel like they’ve been felt,” advised Corrigan. The latter, Corrigan said, is a quote she read somewhere. This is fitting because Beryl Institute President Jason Wolf encouraged conference attendees to steal and bring home as many good ideas as they could find at this event.

“Inside this idea is this expression that I really live by, which is, ‘Tell me more,'” Corrigan said. In other words, ask people — patients — to tell their stories, because no health condition is one-size-fits-all. Try to elicit information rather than just offering people what you think they need to know. “Let’s be healthcare receivers and not just providers,” Corrigan said.

Corrigan recalled going to get an annual facial scrub and remembering from a previous time that she had, in her words, “giant pores.”

The esthetician was about to go over the menu of services when Corrigan told the woman two things about herself: that she had those big pores and that she didn’t like to spend a lot of money. That led the esthetician to understand Corrigan and offer her this advice about she needed for her forehead: “bangs.”

These notions of listening, making human connections and showing compassion and empathy can work in so many situations, including business and, yes, healthcare intake, Corrigan said.

She knows. “I’ve had a lot of experience on all sides of this caregiving thing,” Corrigan noted. Her father died about a year ago from complications of bladder cancer. “We went through the last 16 days together,” she said.

During that time, Corrigan was paired with two palliative caregivers to watch her dad around the clock. She said she will always remember the names of those two compassionate aides: Jenna and Meg. “If you are doing your job right, no one will ever forget your name,” Corrigan said.

This was an especially difficult time because Corrigan was so close to her father. Even though she was 36 years old, had endured breast cancer herself, was married and had two children, Corrigan said she “felt like an adult for the first time” the moment her father was diagnosed with cancer. At that point, in her mind, he ceased being her protector.

“I was no longer George Corrigan’s daughter,” Corrigan said. Instead, she and her mother became George’s caregivers, as she described in her first book, “The Middle Place,” which reached No. 2 on the New York Times nonfiction bestsellers

At age 36, she felt like an adult for the first time, even though she was married and had two children, when her father was diagnosed with bladder cancer and he could no longer be her protector. Yet, throughout his long illness, they only grew closer.

“These times of crisis can be magnificent,” Corrigan said. “There is great potential in the air around crisis,” she added.

“It can be a bumpy road. Things can go wrong.” But it’s the totality of the experience that matters, Corrigan said.

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