The following article from KevinMD.com talks about love and its effects on the health care industry.
Mom, what is the one thing you can’t live without?” My six-year-old son asked me out of nowhere one day.
Air? Water? It was a more interesting riddle than usual.
“Love.” He said proudly, not waiting for me to answer
Wow.
He’s right. Love. But if it is the one thing you can’t live without,
why are we so afraid of it in medicine – a field that sustains life?
Doctors
seldom use the word at work. In fact, I was taught in medical school,
as I’m sure most of us were, that a solid professional boundary between
doctor and patient is critical. If you lose that boundary, dangerous
things happen. We are not to accept gifts from our patients. We block
our home and cell phone numbers when we call them, and we seldom give
out our pager numbers.
Yet I love my patients passionately. I
think about them in the middle of the night. I worry about their kids
and wonder how the last week of school went after I made them promise to
study more. I feel the crumbling inside me when they talk about the
children they left in a faraway country, the ones they talk to every
night but have not seen in 10 years. I want to care for the children of
the babies I delivered. Primary care docs care for you for life, over
your entire family’s lifespan. What does it mean to be there for them
for a lifetime without love? I chose not to find out.
I didn’t
always feel this way. At first I felt overwhelmed, scared of the passion
patients showed for a doctor who dared to care about them. It was hard
to know so many people. They quickly knew everything about me and
expected the same, and I had hundreds of lives to learn. But over time,
and through a thousand urinary tract infections, sore throats, and
colds, the familiarity grew. The constant visits, like water flowing,
etched grooves into my heart – cascading torrents of emotion at times
when I grow frustrated at them, their disease, or both.
So now,
along come teams, and not only are the staff allowed to love the
patients, but the team model seems designed for it. Teams allow
providers the time to focus on their relationship with patients rather
than on menial tasks. In so doing, providers increase their face time
with patients and develop their own meaningful relationships with them.
Independent of the patient-provider relationship, these are
person-person relationships. Of course many providers loved their
patients all along, but the medical assistant, for example, now has the
time and space to officially ask, “How is your family?” “Did you enjoy
your vacation? “What grade is your son in now”?
And patients know they are loved at the clinic. The staff all ooh and aah
at the new babies. They want to hear the birth stories or how the
operation went. Patients notice when the medical assistant has lost
weight, taken off a wedding ring, or put one on. This is not wasted
time. It is the work we do. We change people, make them care more for themselves and their health by openly caring for them first.
Funny
thing is, once you start openly loving patients – once you open
yourself – you become more effective, not less. My patients know I love
them. I remind them when they are getting chemo. I call them if I have
been wondering how they are doing, or I know that I can if I need to.
And in return they help me. They try really, really hard to do
what I ask. They listen to the advice of the medical assistant. They
know her face and some her name. They are so much kinder to all of us
when things are busy, or we are stressed, or down, because everyone is a
person to them now, not a cog in a machine.
I think this is where
patient-centered, team-based care is taking us: both patients and
providers become people again, not cogs in a machine. And perhaps the
one thing that sets people apart from machines – the one thing we can’t
live without – is love.
Kirsten Meisinger is medical director at Union Square Family Health Center in Somerville, MA. She blogs at Primary Care Progress.
