Annals of family medicine
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Annals of family medicine · Nov 2022
Leveraging Free-Form Comments to Assess and Improve Patient Satisfaction.
This study employed a text-analysis methodology to identify themes within patient comments and measure the relationship of those themes to patient satisfaction. Using these findings, a spreadsheet tool was created to allow a large sample of comments to be readily analyzed. ⋯ The tool gives clinicians the ability to easily analyze patient comments and identify actionable measures of patient satisfaction. Additionally, this tool will allow researchers to reduce vast sets of comment text into numerical data suited for quantitative analyses.
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Recent controversies over the characteristics of "professionalism" and its enforcement by medical educators underscore the racialized and gendered norms implicit in this practice. In this essay, we describe the ways nebulous definitions of "professionalism" imbue White, cisgender, straight, and able-bodied standards to police the boundaries of belonging in medicine. ⋯ We seek to resculpt professionalism in a way that centers patients and trainees currently at the margins. This will strengthen the increasingly diverse workforce and ensure that they can effectively address the needs of patients often excluded from quality care.
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Contemplating retirement after 38 years as a family physician has, for me, been an uncomfortably revealing process. I can't help but remember the few patient-care regrets that still upset me after all these years, and I find myself wishing I could go back in time; do things differently; conjure up better outcomes. I can't, of course, but those memories of individual patients eventually led me to consider my entire practice life, the legacy I might leave, and my role in a health care system that has changed so dramatically over the course of my career. ⋯ In this article I try to come to grips with why I was mostly silent, and I share what I am trying to do now at the end of my career to effect change and find my voice. Better late than never, I am speaking up for my colleagues and patients. Now, more than ever, I hope that we physicians will insist on being heard.
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Minutes after starting my family medicine rotation, my first patient crumpled before my eyes. She shared a story of anguish and worry, overwhelmed with the grief of her partner's unexpected death and consequential housing instability. ⋯ It is one thing to read about structural trauma and deeply embedded inequalities; it is another to look into the eyes of the patients whose families are, in part, shaped by them. In this essay, I grapple with a myriad of emotions on my first day of family medicine-and contemplate the courage required to show up, wholeheartedly, for our patients.