How should The Good Doctor respond when medical care can offer no cure? How does The Good Doctor deal with death and dying? First-year students at the UCF College of Medicine came face to face with those questions as they worked recently with hospice care providers and terminally ill patients.<\/p>\n
Their lessons included how teamwork among healthcare providers can ease the patient\u2019s burden, dealing with family dynamics and how to understand the healer\u2019s role in accepting that treatment must end.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs a medical student, my training is all about: take control, find out what\u2019s going on, fix the problem,\u201d said Sean Chagani. \u201cBut hospice takes that control away from the doctor and gives it to the patient. Hospice empowers the patient to make choices about death. I didn\u2019t realize that before.\u201d<\/p>\n
Students worked with nurses, social workers and chaplains from two local hospice organizations \u2013 Vitas and Cornerstone. They worked in two-person teams to see the psychosocial issues related end-of-life care. On March 6, Dr. Gary Miller from VITAS and Dr. Lucy Ertenberg from Cornerstone held a reflections dinner at the College of Medicine for students to share their feelings about the experience. Dr. Miller, who paid for the dinner, said he hoped visiting with hospice patients provided students with an understanding of how teamwork can bring comfort to terminal patients and their families.<\/p>\n
Lisa \u00a0Brubaker talked about the fact that the morning after each hospice home visit, the doctor, nurse and social worker all meet to discuss patient\u2019s and family\u2019s condition and to come up with a joint plan for moving forward. \u201cSeeing how the team worked together made me reflect on how I hope I am part of a great team that will work for the good of the patient,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Student Sami Saikaly said he saw how faith helped several of the hospice patients he visited cope with the physical and emotional pain of dying. \u201cI know God\u2019s taking care of me and that makes the pain bearable,\u201d one of Saikaly\u2019s patients said. The medical student, who considers himself \u201cpretty religious\u201d said he hopes that as a physician he won\u2019t forget about faith to \u201chelp people physically, emotionally and spiritually as well.\u201d<\/p>\n
Communication was another common theme of the student reflections. One patient reassured a student it was OK to talk about death, that he didn\u2019t have to treat it as a taboo subject. Students were surprised to find patients upbeat \u2013 and even joking. Several students said their patients seemed happy and relieved to talk about subjects relating to \u201creal life.\u201d<\/p>\n
Megan Mizera said her patient had not said a word until the social worker left her bedroom. Mizera noticed the patient was drinking coffee. \u201cI asked her, \u2018Do you like coffee?\u2019 I love coffee, I\u2019m addicted to it and we started talking about hazelnut and vanilla cr\u00e8me and we were laughing. I was talking to her about life. She didn\u2019t want to talk about dying. I remembered what a mentor, a retired psychiatrist said to me, that to sit down and really talk to a patient is always meaningful. \u201d<\/p>\n
Family dynamics were another key lesson for the students. One patient had four generations of family surrounding him in his final days. Other families couldn\u2019t bear to see their loved one dying and stayed away. A patient worried about who would care for her disabled child when she were gone. A 60-year-old daughter, with serious health issues of her own, was caring for her elderly mother and worrying that she wasn\u2019t able to do enough. A member of the hospice team told her, \u201cI understand you want to control this, but this is out of your control. But you can be there, be her daughter. That is the comfort she needs.\u201d<\/p>\n
Medical student Austin Moats witnessed that talk and reflected on it at the hospice event. \u201cIt taught me that it only takes a second to ask family how they\u2019re doing,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd a few words in this situation seemed to go a very long way.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How should The Good Doctor respond when medical care can offer no cure? How does The Good Doctor deal with death and dying? First-year students at the UCF College of Medicine came face to face with those questions as they worked recently with hospice care providers and terminally ill patients. Their lessons included how teamwork among healthcare providers can ease…","protected":false},"author":152,"featured_media":57896,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"template-twocol.php","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"lazy_load_responsive_images_disabled":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":"","_wp_rev_ctl_limit":""},"categories":[12,17],"tags":[979],"tu_author":[],"class_list":["post-57895","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health","category-medicine","tag-college-of-medicine"],"yoast_head":"\n