Page 176 - Hospital Authority Convention 2017

Masterclasses
HOSPITAL AUTHORITY CONVENTION 2017

M12.2 What Matters to Patients? 13:15 Convention Hall C
Insight from Patient Experience and Satisfaction Survey
Programmes and Way Forward

Human Touch in Healthcare Delivery
Chow KM
New Territories East Cluster, Hospital Authority, Hong Kong

Our beloved teacher Dr SF Leung mentioned that the computer has now entered the doctor-patient dynamic as a "third
mistress," stealing away the time and attention of the doctor. True, the computer is powerful and important, handling many
aspects of patient care from scheduling appointment to documenting history, ordering test, checking for on-hand medication
and allergy, and communicating with colleagues. Does the computer have to be worshipped that much?

As a matter of fact, a recent article from the Annals of Internal Medicine reports that for every hour spent with patients,
physicians spent two hours on electronic health records and desk work.1 Yes, you hear us right. Two times of that spent with
patients. Can any “mistress” beat that record? Can we beat that temptation?

Stated another way, we want to give our patients well-deserved human touch. At the moment, human touch is vanishing
rapidly in modern hospitals. So much so that Abraham Verghese has to coin the term “iPatient,” referring to the problem
of chart-as-surrogate-for-the-patient phenomenon.2 Another term is “chartoma” – a malignant and metastasizing disease
immortalised by being cut and pasted into every note by the sheer key strokes of “CTRL+C” on our computer keyboard.

As pointed out by William Osler a century ago, “It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than
what sort of a disease a patient has.” Solutions will not be easy. But we can start by moving back, bit by bit, to the bedside.

References:
Sinsky C, Colligan L, Li L, Prgomet M, Reynolds S, Goeders L, Westbrook J, Tutty M, Blike G. Allocation of physician time in
ambulatory practice: a time and motion study in 4 specialties. Ann Intern Med 2016; 165: 753-760
Verghese A. Culture shock — patient as icon, icon as patient. N Engl J Med 2008; 359:2748-2751

M12.3 What Matters to Patients? 13:15 Convention Hall C
Insight from Patient Experience and Satisfaction Survey
Programmes and Way Forward

Information Giving at Patient Discharge: Patient Discharge Information Summary Pilot Project
Tang KS
Quality and Safety Division, New Territories West Cluster, Hospital Authority, Hong Kong
Wednesday, 17 May “If you can’t explain an idea to a nine-year-old, then you don’t really understand it.”
There is much we can learn from Albert Einstein’s observation:

How often are our patients discharged from acute hospital without understanding what they need to do? Much of the time,
elderly patients just do not understand their medication or appointments. The situation is made worse by the time constraint
of medical staff, and even more so under the pressure of bed crisis.
While the doctors and nurses are hard hit by the time to communicate with patients, a succinct summary page can serve an
additional role of patient education. That is the reason why we will pilot a Patient Discharge Information Summary for elderly
patients discharged from acute medical wards. The summary page is designed to deliver simple and easy-to-understand
information, including salient medication and drug-related take-home-messages, clinic and allied health appointments. All is
written in plain language.
To minimise overloading of information, the summary will only target those common drugs that matter to patients, and the
crucial drug information that patients need to remember. In other words, everything should be made as simple as possible,
but not simpler.

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