Physicians, let your caring show

by Carla Rotering In 1979, my young son came home from school with pictures of what his parents did for a living. Mine was an entire page covered in circles and when I asked him what he thought I did, he replied, "You make rounds." I thought it was funny--but I also realized my little boy had no idea how deeply I cared about the patients I shared my days, and sometimes my nights, with. As an adult, he has come to know the depth of caring physicians hold in their hearts and minds as we go about our work. Yet as these years have passed, and as the culture of medicine has shifted in intensity, demand, diminished autonomy and the multitude of variables we whisper about every day, that very caring has become less visible to our patients. I sat recently with a young medical student reflecting on his first clinical rotations, and his observation was that practicing physicians simply don’t seem to care about people anymore. How, then, do we make visible this deep caring at the core of our profession? When we incorporate simple steps to shift the way we communicate as physicians, we develop new habits that are easy to implement and become a way of life for us. Those habits, over time, subtly shift our own experience and impact the quality of the relationships we form with our patients. We make our caring visible, and we also come to know a more fulfilling substance and pace in our work. Caring can be demonstrated through our words and our actions. When w...
Source: hospital impact - Category: Health Managers Authors: Source Type: blogs