The Art of Healthcare

Have you ever felt that you have had to "hide" parts of yourself in your clinical practice?

What did that feel like when you did it?

Jack Holroyde joins me to talk about bringing your whole self to your practice of healthcare.

Jack and I talk about

- The concept of professionalism constraining our ability to help someone

- Communicating effectively instead of clinically

- Appreciating the gravity of our patient's experience in what we might find a mundane interaction

- The identity we are assuming, and whether that serves us

- Recognising that we are full of shit a lot of the time, and how to become more comfortable with that.

- Challenging long held biases

Connect with Jack on Twitter https://twitter.com/jack_holroyde

How well do you understand the values your patient holds? What do they care about besides just getting their problem fixed?

We can “fix” their problem AND not actually improve their lives or their health. BUT if we understand what matters to them then we are better able to fix their problem in a way that not only improves their health, but also improves their lives.

I’m joined by Eva Villalba for a conversation all about values based healthcare. We chat through

What is values based Healthcare?

The traditional ways we have been measuring healthcare and why they are outdated now

Providing healthcare through a broad lens

When and where the best place is to have a values led conversation

What it’s like as a patient not having your values taken into account

Giving information so people know what to expect and can plan for it

Giving people the tools to make informed decisions

Predicting and preventing future challenges from occurring

Why patients often don’t realise that they can talk about things other than their problem

Why Values based care is great for healthcare providers as well as patients

Why Values based conversations are important to continue over the whole course of treatment

How we can measure values based care

Why you shouldn’t measure what you are not going to change

How we develop patient partnerships at a micro, macro and meso level

We need to develop personally at least as much as we need to develop professionally if we want to deliver great healthcare.

I’m joined by Grant Downie OBE, medical and performance specialist consultant. He is also a physiotherapist and mentor for people wanting to improve their leadership and communication skills.

Today we talk through

• Every day is a school day
• Broadening our experiences through learning about others
• Learning for curiosity NOT perfection
• Advancing our learning past the fear of getting thring wrong
• Pushing the boundaries and waiting for the science to catch up
• Using scientific principles AND remember you are an artist
• Why Grant has never treated an injury in his life
• The art of changing the metaphor
• Not using belittling language
• Broadening our vision of the person past the pathology
• Developing our emotional intelligence
• Seeking help ourselves
• Trying to solve problems we need to learn how to manage instead
• Showing your own vulnerabilities
• Not telling people how to see the world, but trying to understand how they see it
• Understanding your strengths and working on them
• Creating personal development plans as well as professional development plans
• Figuring out how to treat the person opposite you the way they want to be treated

How have your beliefs about the healthcare you deliver evolved over the time you’ve been practicing?

What’s shaped that evolution?

How do you try to consciously evolve your beliefs?

Do you spend too much attention on the doing side of health that you miss the being side of health?

Mark Stolow, CJO of Huddol had a deep conversation with me about these questions and many more. And don’t worry, it wasn’t just questions, he offered up some great practical ways that we can answer them in our own practice.

In this episode we talk through

Healthcare is the art of honouring our state of being in the world

Our evolving understanding of health at our individual level

Our evolving understanding of health at a collective level

Improving health through improving ability to make sense of the world

How health providers fit into the being side of health and the doing side of health

Moving out of an either or mindset in regards to health

Incorporating science into our broader understanding of the human experience

There is no singular healthcare truth

How to operate from an integral perspective in healthcare

Baking a healthcare cake

Letting go of old beliefs that are no longer helpful

Why we shouldn’t just try and build a better mousetrap

What is informing who I believe I am?

If you enjoyed this episode and want to dive deeper into learning these skills with likeminded health professionals then you’ll want to consider joining the Art of Healthcare Team

Training for person perception and communication needs the same rigor and status as “hard skills training”

This episode’s guest is Danielle Blanch Hartigan, PhD, MPH who is social scientist with interdisciplinary research and teaching interests in psychology and public health. Her research, broadly defined, aims to understand how psychological constructs influence the powerful relationship between healthcare providers and patients to foster patient-centered care and to improve patient perceptions of their care.

Today we talk through

• What empathy is in clinical interactions
• How empathy shows up for different participants of the healthcare interaction
• How we define empathy
• Why we shouldn’t use the term “soft skills”
• Empathy and non-verbal communication are “hard skills”
• How the use of empathy is valuable for pain relief
• The behaviors we should be training to bring more empathy to our practice
• How non-verbal information is perceived
• How we use verbal and non-verbal information to make judgements about each other
• Why we should discuss non-verbal behavior with our patients, and why it doesn’t always matter if we get it wrong
• How we can get better at our non-verbal behaviors
• Why you should make a list of questions you can use to dig deeper
• Some of the communication challenges and opportunities that come with telemedicine

If you enjoyed this episode and want to dive deeper into learning these skills with likeminded health professionals then you’ll want to consider joining the Art of Healthcare Team

The concept of person-centred care is a complex one. To deliver true person-centred care there are a lot of components to be aware of and no definitive “How-to” manual.

As healthcare providers we’re trained to solve problems. When it comes to person-centred care we typically focus on the wrong problems. We’re good at finding and addressing bio-medical and bio-mechanical problems. We’re even reasonable at identifying and addressing patient-centred problems. We haven’t been trained to look for problems at a person-centred level.

We need to be able to identify these person-centred problems in order to help deliver person-centred care. This podcast will help you do that.

It’s not the only way to improve your person-centred healthcare, it’s probably not the best way, but it is a way we can wrap our heads around so we can improve our ability to help people.

Delivering healthcare happens in a fast paced, often high stress and high stakes environment. The pressure is on us as providers to perform day in and day out to deliver high performance healthcare.

Just like athletic performance doesn’t just come down to how well the person catches, throws, or passes. Healthcare performance isn’t just the technical skills that we’ve learned, it goes so far beyond that. It’s the way that we prepare and show up to deliver our care.

I’m joined by David Clancy, a father and husband, and also physiotherapist to multiple high performance athletes and host of the fantastic “Sleep, Eat, Perform, Repeat” podcast, to talk through the traits we should be looking to develop to be high performers in the healthcare world.

We talk through

• The three traits high performers share
• How to develop these traits
• Trainable practices for developing curiosity, presence, and a learning mindset
• Where ego serves us and where it impedes us
• How we can range out from our profession