Theme 4
Exhibit behaviors including compassion and excellence, commensurate with the role of a doctoring primary care profession.
The personal change project offered an opportunity to both practice behavior change skills that could be beneficial with future patients, and to gain perspective on the difficulties of behavior changes. It's easy for me to sit there with a patient and just tell them they need to change a behavior to maximize health outcomes, but to actually experience what it is like to go through a significant behavior change and the challenges associated with that helped me have more empathy with my patients who are attempting to change behaviors. Having this empathy helps me continue to build my compassion for patients so that I can provide them with individualized care that is meaningful to them.
This project addressed the following graduate outcomes:
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3: Behavioral change must be a collaboration between provider and patient. While the provider can help guide the patient through the process of behavior change, it is up to the patient to have the desire and take the actions to make the change. This collaboration can be very successful in achieving health outcomes for patients, and often with certain behavior changes, it can often reduce the burden of care due to healthy lifestyle changes.
7: This project not only allowed me to practice my own personal behavior change as a patient, but it allowed me to coach one of my classmates through the process as well. It can be very difficult to coach someone through behavior change and the more practice I get with it, the more valuable of a skill it will become. Communicating with a person-centered approach allows me to make real connections with my patients, help them individualize their care, and eventually have more positive health outcomes.
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During my first clinical experience, I gained a lot of experience working with patients and made a lot of great connections with all the clinicians and staff working at the facility. I sadly also saw first hand what burnout looked like in a workplace. The staff amazingly never let the burnout they were experiencing impact their quality of care, but it definitely impacted their own lives. I saw this as an opportunity to educate the clinic on the importance of addressing their own health to try to deal with stress and burnout. Not only should compassion be shown toward our patients, it should also be shown toward our colleagues and peers.
This experience addressed the following graduate outcomes:
3: Burnout among healthcare providers is a growing concern. Burnout impacts both the provider's personal lives as well as the quality of care provided to the patient. Attempting to collaborate and come up with interventions for providers to reduce the impact and prevalence of burnout will not only improve their personal health, but improve on their patient's health outcomes as well. Improving both outcomes will lead to increased saving on healthcare costs.
8: This opportunity allowed me to provide members of the clinic with education on the impact of burnout and possible personal interventions to address their concerns. I reflected on a concern that I noticed in the clinic and in a sensitive way, I brought this concern about burnout to my colleagues' attentions, so that they can be aware and have some resources to address the concerns as they see necessary.
9: This is one of the few experiences during the course of the DPT program where I decided what I wanted to educate myself on. This inservice allowed me to not only educate myself on a very relevant subject, but then pass along my new-found knowledge to my colleagues. Committing to this process of educating myself and then others will help me continue to be a lifelong learner.