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#HealthXPH: When Healthcare Providers and Patients Meet Halfway

I attended #EASD2015 last September. I posted two tweets about social media and the conversation between doctors and patients.

 

 

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Last March, I wrote this blog post on #IWishMyPatient. I had promised Stacey (@coffeemommy) I’d write. It’s part of an initiative to foster context, understanding and empathy between doctors and patients (#IWishMyDoc). So I thought, let’s take this further at #HealthXPh tweet chat on 17 October 9 pm Manila time (9 am EST).

T1 How can healthcare providers and patients give feedback to each other outside of their therapeutic encounters?

I’d moderated a #HealthXPH tweet chat last year on online physician ratings. Are there other ways? In that chat, doctors had expressed concerns about being rated over things that they had no control of like parking or the waiting room experience. Trisha Torrey has written an illuminating post, How to Complain or Provide Feedback to Your Doctor: The Right Approach Will Improve Your Chances of Being Heard. I appreciated very much that she enumerated “problems you should not complain about” and “problems you should provide feedback about.”

Dr. Lawrence Altman wrote about Dr. Arnold Relman’s experience at the ER in A Patient’s View of Nurses, where he quotes Dr. Relman that he “had never before understood how much good nursing care contributes to patients’ safety and comfort, especially when they are very sick or disabled.” How else can patients give feedback to their nurses?

T2 Complete this. #IWishMyPatient

That blog post on #IWishMyPatient I’d written was not a comfortable one to write. I hope the tweet chat can provide a venue for healthcare providers to give constructive feedback.

T3. Complete this. #IWishMyDoc or #IWishMyNurse

Eric Goldman says “Encourage, don’t discourage patient reviews,” in How Doctors Should Respond to Negative Online Reviews. We can all learn from this.

There are many ways to give constructive criticism. Clifford Lazarus points out three ways in The Art of Constructive Criticism: Are you A Constructive Critic or Just Critical. I like this advice best –

Deliver your messages in the form of I-statements rather than You-statements.

See you at the #HealthXPH tweet chat!

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