As a primary care physician myself, I found Atul Gawande’s new article “The Heroism of Incremental Care” encouraging and empowering. The New Yorker piece highlights the importance of longitudinal care between a patient and their primary care provider.
When Gawande visits a headache clinic in Massachusetts, the physician there tells him she starts by listening to the patient: “You ask them to tell the story of their headache and then you stay very quiet for a long time.” What have you found is the most important component of a physician-patient encounter? If you are a provider, do you feel you’re always able to listen to the patient’s full story? If you’re a patient, do you feel listened to when you see your doctor?
When Gawande visits the primary care clinic in Boston, he’s told the reason primary care is important to bettering patient health is due to the “relationship”. Do you agree? Have you had a relationship with a primary care provider that has invariably improved your health over the years? If you are a primary care provider, has this been your experience with patients?
Writing Prompt: Gawande writes of the clinic he visits: “At any given moment, someone there might be suturing a laceration, lancing an abscess, aspirating a gouty joint, biopsying a suspicious skin lesion, managing a bipolar-disorder crisis, assessing a geriatric patient who had taken a fall, placing an intrauterine contraceptive device, or stabilizing a patient who’d had an asthma attack.” Think about the last time you saw your primary care provider. Write about that visit in the present tense, then project a decade or two into the future. Imagine how that visit, and many others like it, might have made a difference to your health decades from now. Write for 10 minutes.