Recently, I did two weeks of Palliative Care consults. During that rotation, I had the opportunity to actually give patients/ their families time to discuss their symptoms/ concerns and answer their questions.
Some context- my team normally covers 10-20 patients (of varying acuity). We get roughly one day off a week, and between rounding, patient care, documentation, etc, most of our days are 10 hours long. Patients/families put an enormous amount of trust in their medical teams; asking questions about labs/ medications/ plans outside of rounds is actually totally reasonable. But honestly? If we gave every patient 30 minutes a day to ask additional questions, we would be stuck in the hospital for 3-6 more hours. Thus, throughout residency, I’ve treated a lot of those pages for additional info with frustration/ trepidation. (Some of that is bc a lot of those conversations also become an opportunity for family/ patients to transfer their frustration onto us but that’s a convo for another day.)
Still- it was really gratifying to actually be able to hold space for patients/ families in the way they deserve.
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