Recently, I asked a colleague about the quality of care her hospitalized mother was getting. “Well, you can at least have a conversation with her doctor,” she replied. Clearly this was a big relief.
High-level skills like reflectiveness and empathy are an important part of medical education these days. That is all to the good, of course. But as I noted last May in an article in The New England Journal of Medicine, medical schools may be underemphasizing a much simpler virtue: good manners.
In the article, I described a common-sense method for spreading clinical courtesy that I call “etiquette-based medicine,” and I proposed a simple six-step checklist for doctors to follow when meeting a hospitalized patient for the first time….
See how many of the six you can guess before you read it all.
My one question is about the last recommendation: Ask the patient how he/she feels about being in the hospital? I suppose if the trauma or illness is severe, one is grateful for being in a hospital, but really, wouldn’t most of us rather be home? I remember, when things were hectic, my father used to say, “I’d rather be here–wherever ‘here’ was–than in the best hospital in town”. I think that reflects most peoples’ feelings.
To the list I would add a seventh:
Look the patient in the eye.