Bedside Manners

The profound power and effect of bedside manners really struck me with one particular patient I saw last week. The family had gone through a stressful, harrowing surgery and the post-op course was rocky. There were a few medical problems that the surgeons asked consultants for advice on, and so the family encountered many new faces. Everyone acted in the patient's best interest, but in doing so, one practitioner encountered a situation that she thought was urgent. Because she was enacting a plan to care for this patient, she did not have time to build the best rapport. The following day when I met the patient and her family, they fixated on the poor care they received from this one practitioner. I spent a significant amount of time trying to smooth it over.

Bedside manners are a surprisingly fickle entity. From a distance, they seem to be obvious: respect your patients, listen, be kind, sympathize, form a partnership, explain what you're doing, be professional, modulate facial expressions and behaviors. But putting this into practice is not that simple. When you notice something that might be life threatening, you might gloss over the finer points of eliciting a patient's feelings. First impressions color everything; if you don't make a favorable initial rapport, then recovering is exceedingly difficult, even if your bedside manners are perfect. But I found that listening to the patient's concerns really helped me understand their perception of the problem and allowed me to earn some measure of trust with which to repair that therapeutic bond between the patient and her caregivers. It is extraordinarily difficult to have outstanding bedside manners all the time - rain or shine, sleep deprived or not - but we all must strive to maintain it as much of the time as we can.