Patient-Centred Medicine in Transition - The Heart of the Matter (Hardcover, 2014 ed.)

The recent history of medicine is one of great biological and technological advances. Diagnoses are being made earlier, diseases caught sooner, patients living longer. And yet there is one area that lags behind the rest of the field: despite the efforts of graduate courses and training manuals, too many doctors still find communication a challenge. In Patient-Centered Medicine in Transition, the focus is not on skills or tools but on context to improve communication not only with patients, but between colleagues, with management, and within and across teams. Rigorous and readable, this timely manifesto presents new models of team process in patient-centered care, emphasizing their value in reducing harmful medical errors and improving patient care, safety, and outcomes. Further, the author provides significant research evidence supporting democratic approaches to communication in medicine while also addressing vital questions of ethics, empathy, gender dynamics, and physician self-care. Included in the coverage: * The epidemic of communication hypocompetence. * Patient-centeredness without a center. * How doctors think can be judged from how they listen and speak. * Working and learning in teams in the new era of health care. * Blunting Occam's Razor: team process and complexity theory. * Building a collaborative community in medical education research. Patient-Centered Medicine in Transition offers a bold new reconceptualization of an important topic and a roadmap to new frontiers in practice to be read and discussed by researchers and practitioners in medical education.