This is a story about how my patients and Patients Canada have changed my practice (and life).
Sometimes when you are a healthcare practitioner, you forget to think of yourself as a patient. As a practitioner, I often think about the diagnosis, the treatments, and the strategies we (patient and practitioner) will use to reach the particular goals we've set together. Has there been anything new in the scientific literature that will help any of my more complicated cases? Can we progress to a new strengthening or preventative stage? I used to think of this as the only way for me to influence the patient experience.
One of the great and surprising pleasures of my job has been how much I've learned from being able to talk to my patients.
Being a functional and movement-focused chiropractor, means that my appointments are a little longer, which allows a little more face time with my patients. Essentially, I'm able to learn more about their everyday lifestyles, struggles, successes and stories. The practitioner part of my mind enjoys this because I can gather "data points" to gain further insight into underlying mechanical/ lifestyle patterns that may be contributing to their pain, dysfunction, and movement impairments. Often, this can lead to a significant change in treatment strategy.
I would consistently hear how nice it was to be heard, especially when I would take their experiences with their own health into account and alter a treatment plan accordingly. Embarrassingly, this would make me feel I was going above and beyond as a therapist. However, as time passed, the cumulative effect of these talks, and 'data- gathering' chats, had an unexpected outcome. I realized this wasn't something to celebrate as a practitioner, it was something to empathize with as a patient. It was becoming more and more evident that my patient's did not feel like they had a voice- there was nowhere to express their concerns to, that they are often at the mercy of their practitioners, and "the system." I realized that it was rare to feel that as a patient, you could create change to your patient experience by communicating. Here's where I started to understand that I should always think of myself as a patient, because we are ALL patients.
Even if we all lend an ear, as practitioners/ caregivers/ loved ones, how can we bring the common concerns of patients to influence change... patient-centred change?
Although, many of us have our hearts in the right places, the medical system is complicated and can present many challenges to both practitioners and patients on both a small and large scale. What can I do to help? It was a couple years ago now, that I was really starting to empathize with that feeling of helplessness (and guilt for not being able to do more) that I was hearing everyday.
Enter Patients Canada...
One day, after going on a long diatribe, not unlike the one you've just read, I was presented with the opportunity to join the Key Performance Targets panel within the Patients Canada Organization (a patient-led organization that fosters collaboration among patients, family caregivers and the healthcare community to create change with the patient experience.)
It has been absolutely inspiring to work with this organization and its volunteers.
The Key Performance Target panel compiles voluntarily supplied patient and caregiver narratives from across the country. These narratives are the basis for helping us find out what the pressing patient-centered patient experience issues are. We draw on these stories to derive practical, measurable targets that can change the experiences of patients and caregivers. These targets range from small (adding an extra chair for caregivers/parents/loved ones to be more comfortable while waiting) to large (decreasing the cost of hospital parking, increasing training for Emergency Department staff regarding anxious patients, etc.) The important concept here is that there is a place for us to communicate, be heard and to create change.
We are just in the finishing stages of our work on Emergency Department care and are always looking for more input and patient/ caregiver narratives. Please help us at Patients Canada get access to a wider range of patient/ caregiver narratives by sending your stories to communications@patientscanada.ca. This is just one of the many wonderful things that Patient's Canada is working on. More on that, another time.
Your stories can be about any aspect of your patient experience going through our health care system. If possible, please include the resolution/ conclusion/ current state of the major theme in your story. For those of you that are both practitioner and patient, please help get your patients' stories heard by encouraging them to submit a story! We'd love to hear more stories from the farther reaches of our beautiful country, everyone's voice matters!
Thanks for reading and spreading the word,
Dr. E. Lock