By understanding the patient’s lived experience with illness, suffering and even death a doctor is more able to connect with and treat them as a fellow human being. The patient narrative can come through a variety of paths, such as patient panels, documentary films, literature, visual arts, and more. The Gold Foundation supports projects that help to deepen understanding and empathy for the patient experience, bringing critical insights to medical trainees.
A Selection of Patient Voice Programs:
Ball: A Traumedy by Brian Lobel. A one-man show depicting Lobel's struggle with cancer at a number of medical schools. Click
here for a description.
LaurelBooks, an imprint of CavanKerry Press, are collections of poetry and prose that explore the poignant issues associated with confronting physical and/or psychological illness. The Gold Foundation partners with CavanKerry Press to bring these powerful and insightful books to print. The Foundation also sponsors readings and discussions of these works with medical students, residents, faculty and doctors in practice. LaurelBooks Poetry & Prose
Life With Sam excerpt
The Patient as Educator - The language of illness as shared by patients is a powerful vehicle to develop the awareness of the suffering of another – and to fuel the desire to relieve it.That was why The Gold Foundation was excited to partner with Stuart Green, MSW, a practice psychotherapist and residency director at Overlook Hospital in New Jersey. Green’s idea: to hire and train women with breast cancer to teach resident physicians effective communication and empathy skills.
Initially, residents meet in group sessions in which patient-educators describe their personal experience with breast cancer. The patients talk about their initial diagnosis, quality of life issues and interactions with physicians and the healthcare system. Subsequently, each resident participates in a individual session with the patient-educator who role plays the “patient.” The Gold Foundation strongly believes that these powerful workshops build effective communication techniques and expand a physician’s empathy – both interpersonal skills that are so essential for the humanistic practitioner.
Medical Students as Film Makers - Video Slam With funding support from the Gold Foundation, Dr. Dan Shapiro, Professor and Chair of Medical Humanities Dept., at Penn State College of Medicine, developed a course known as Video Slam. He was uniquely motivated by his own experiences on as a cancer survivor and as a medical school faculty member.
"A poll found that many US primary-care physicians feel ill-equipped to meet the needs of their chronically ill patients…To fill that gap, we must enlist chronically ill patients as teachers. Students spend many months following their patients on camera. As they edit hours and hours of footage down to a 7 minute narrative it forces them to think carefully about the most important aspects of the patients' experiences."
The resulting short films explore the complex psychological and practical challenges of coping with illness and are in use in medical schools around the country.
