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Presentation: Our Best Selves: One Surgeon’s Reflections on Compassionate Care
Time: Saturday Afternoon
Purpose: To discuss the difficult roles of caregivers and health care providers in order to define and find our best selves.
Objectives:
Review system and physician emotional barriers to communicating about end-of-life care.
Relate recent data regarding patient-doctor discussions about end-of-life care.
Review the principles of narrative medicine.
Illustrate how narrative medicine can be used to improve our approach to care.
Author of Final Exam: A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality (2007)
Attending physician, West Roxbury Veterans Administration Hospital
Bio:
Pauline Chen is passionate about improving healthcare. Her particular concern is end-of-life (palliative) patient care. At the start of her book Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality she asks: ’’Why are we so bad at taking care of the dying?’’ The answer is a powerful mix of factors: a professional culture that, despite being intimately familiar with death, shrinks from discussing it with patients; the systematic training of young doctors to compartmentalize and dehumanize the patient; and the patients’ indefatigable hope for recovery.
Through her practice as a transplant surgeon and her experiences of dealing with terminally ill patients, Dr. Chen came to understand that, commonly, doctors consider a patient’s death as a sign of imperfect care and thus a personal failure. And doctors hate to fail. Doctors strive to combat their patients’ sicknesses, but if the battle starts to become a losing one then doctors do not prepare their patients for inevitable death. Instead, the battle for life and denial of death continues with the frequent result that many patients die in a hospitals Intensive Care Unit while under-going painful treatment rather than at home with pain-management and in peace. Dr. Chen wants to change this practice.
Pauline Chen was educated at Harvard University and Northwestern University Medical School and completed her general surgery training at Yale University. Dr. Chen is the recipient of numerous awards including the UCLA Outstanding Physician of the Year Award in 1999 and the George Longstreth Humanness Award at Yale for most exemplifying empathy, kindness, and care in an age of advancing technology. She is a surgeon specializing in liver and kidney transplants and the treatment of cancer. Her first book, Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality, was published by Knopf in January 2007.
She is an award-winning teacher who has also made keynote speeches broadly about the healthcare industry, but also to groups specifically concerned with palliative care.