Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Stories in the Service of Making a Better Doctor

Doctor and Patient: Stories in the Service of Making a Better Doctor
By PAULINE W. CHEN, M.D.
Published: October 24, 2008, NYT
Narrative medicine employs short stories, poems and essays to build empathy in young doctors.

"...As part of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education’s Education Innovations Project, Dr. Panush and his faculty colleagues bring poetry, short stories and essays to rounds each day and discuss them in the context of the patients they see. These daily discussions, supplemented by offsite weekly conferences, form the core of the residents’ narrative medicine experience.
One year into the program, Dr. Panush and his colleagues looked at the effect of these daily discussions on the residents and their patients. What they found were significant improvements in patient evaluations of residents and patients’ health and quality of life, from hospital admission to discharge."

Marina: perhaps literature has a greater purpose, after all!

Books on Doctors as Patients and a few on the Doctor-Patient Relationship