PCC or Patient Centered Care

Well during my first REAL day of school I started a course called Patient Centered Care.

PCC is a course that is completely astounding to me. Basically the course is a full year course designed to learn how to speak to patients. That's it. Sounds simple right? That's what I thought...then he decided to give an example.

When a doctor/dentist (basically the class is centered around medicine and profs use the word dentistry whenever they remember that there are dentistry students in the room) discuss with a patient their reasons/concerns/fears/past history it's called a history. The prof stated that 80% of all illnesses can be diagnosed simply by a proper history. That means that the ~15 minutes one spends with a patient can ID 4/5 ailments! Incredible!

So I'm not going even get into another implication that one should be able to help to diagnose something in those 15 minutes because I'll tell you right now I wouldn't be able to do it.

The issue here now is talking. Everyone knows I'm a talker. It's a gene I got from my dad. I've always thought it's been easy to talk to people. It helped that I worked at the golf course where I talked to people young, old, rich, poor, drunk, or more than one of the aforementioned at the same time. I got comfortable talking about gas prices and hips with the seniors and wrestling with younger people and so on.

However, this is something totally different. Talking to patients isn't just mindless banter when one needs to kill time while waiting for a transaction to occur. It's THE THING. I never thought about that until now.

That's why this course is going to be so exciting. I'll have to use my talking skills that I think I possess...but learn how to listen properly and use them to convey empathy and many other things. I doubt that I'm making a mountain out of a molehill....this is a mountain. I think that if one can't master this, one will have serious trouble with their job.

Despite having to learn all of this, I know I can do it and it will be a rewarding experience too.

On a sidenote, by learning this, I know now that I don't know how to talk to patients. My knowledge has gone from unknown unknowns to known unknowns. Confused? Think about Donald Rumsfeld discussing the war on terror and why people should be confused. Thanks to my prof today for clearing that up.