One shift more rhythm doctor series#
In an Australian-first, the course is offered to medical students as a four-week elective.ĭr Birch says medical students are asked to respond through writing exercises to a series of provocations or prompts. Now he's also teaching in the University of Melbourne's narrative medicine course. Skills outside the boxĪward-winning author Tony Birch regularly teaches creative writing.
So they come in with a lot of empathy and by the time they leave medical school as doctors, they have much less than they started with."ĭr Reilly believes narrative medicine is "a very neat, practical and efficient way of bringing empathy back in". "It actually has the effect of squeezing empathy out of medical students. It's very competitive there's a very high study load.
"Medical school is currently structured is extremely intense. "Research shows very clearly that there's a decline in empathy through the years of medical school," Dr Reilly says. "And this meant we couldn't actually support him through this last crucial period in his life."Īmy's story is unlikely to be an isolated one. "The way that information was delivered was so cold, blunt and devoid of empathy, that it made my dad feel completely hopeless and disempowered - so much so that he refused to tell us what the doctor had said to him about the amount of time he had left," Amy says. "Unless we really encourage good, deep attentive listening, we're going to miss valuable information and a valuable opportunity to build trust and connect with our patients," she says.Ī different approach might've changed outcomes for Life Matters listener Amy*, who explained how her father was told by his doctors that his illness had become terminal. Listening and empathy are both integral to the practice. "That storyteller has power." An empathy deficitĭr Reilly practices and teaches narrative medicine, a method of consultation in which doctors hear their patients' experiences as a story. "When patients come to me, they come with a story about their illness, that narrative of their illness experience," she says. It led the doctors to do a number of extra tests - including a urine test, chest X-ray and blood test - which were "building up in terms of the complexity and cost, both to the patient and to the system", Dr Reilly says.ĭr Reilly says the more patients feel listened to, the more likely they are to have closer and more productive relationships with their medical providers. Their three-year-old daughter had a fever and doctors treating her believed it was likely a viral illness and that the child wasn't too unwell.īut the family remained highly anxious about the child's illness. Without those skills, they'll miss valuable information and a valuable opportunity to build trust and connect with their patients.įor example, Dr Reilly recalls meeting a family at her paediatric emergency department several years ago.
When patients visit a doctor they bring "complex and sometimes quite ambiguous problems", Dr Reilly says.Īnd these aren't always answered by a purely scientific approach to medicine.ĭr Reilly believes it's essential that health professionals also have skills in listening deeply to their patients. It's 11 seconds," she says.īut when they are given that space, Dr Reilly says a patient's experience is vastly different - and so is the feeling they walk away with. She points to a 2019 US study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine that looked into the time it takes before a doctor interrupts a patient for the first time.
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