Dec 8, 2022
Eric and I weren’t sure what to call this podcast - storytelling and medicine? Narrative medicine? We discussed it with today’s guests Heather Coats, palliative care NP-scientist, and Thor Ringler, poet. It wasn’t until the end that the best term emerged - storycatching. Because that really is what this is about. Clinicians “catching” patient life stories.
What’s in a story? Well, as we learned, everything. Our patients aren’t “the 76 year old with heart failure in room 202,” as Heather Coats astutely noted. They’re people, and what makes us people if not our life’s stories? Our loves, our triumphs, our failures, our work, our families.
Thor Ringler helped start the My Life My Story project at the Madison VA in Wisconsin. It’s since spread to over 70 VAs. VA “gets” the importance of storytelling in medicine, without the need for reams of research to back it up. As Thor notes, capturing patient stories has face validity as positively impacting the patients who share their stories and have them documented, and for the clinicians who get to truely and deeply know their patients in far greater depth than “what brought you to the hospital?” Heather Coats is hard at work establishing the evidence base for the power of capturing patient stories in healthcare settings, for those health systems that need a little more convincing.
Wonderful work. Enjoy!
Many links:
VA Presents: My Life, My Story:
George: A Voice To Be Heard on Apple Podcasts
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id1529359511?i=1000489683280
Every Veteran has a story. Our
mission is to help them tell it.
https://www.va.gov/wholehealth/mylifemystory/
My Life, My Story: VA’s
healthcare improvements through deliberate storytelling -
YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpzgVlExS20&ab_channel=VeteransHealthAdministration
Storytelling Helps Hospital
Staff Discover The Person Within The Patient
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/06/08/729351842/storytelling-helps-hospital-staff-discover-the-person-within-the-patient
A few data based publication links from Person-Centered Narrative
Intervention Program of Research:
Unpacking characteristics of
spirituality through the lens of persons of colour living with
serious illness: The need for nurse-based education to increase
understanding of the spiritual dimension in
healthcare
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jocn.16055
Integration of Person-Centered
Narratives Into the Electronic Health Record: Study
Protocol
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32740306/
Bennett, C.R., Shive, N.,
Coats, H. (2020). What Mattered Then, Now,
and Always: Illness Narratives From Persons of
Color.
Journal of Hospice and
Palliative Nursing, 22 (5):392-400/ PMID: 32740304
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32740304/
Coats, H., Meek, P., Schilling, L., Akard, T., Doorenbos,
A. (2020). Connection -- The Integration of a
Person-Centered Narrative Intervention into the Electronic Health
Record: An implementation
study. Journal of
Palliative Medicine, 23
(6)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7249456/
Coats, H., Crist, J., Berger, A., Sternberg, E., &
Rosenfeld, A. (2015). African American elders’ serious illness
experiences: Narratives of “God did,” “God will,”
and “Life is better.” Qualitative Health
Research.
doi:10.1177/1049732315620153. PMID:
26701962
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1049732315620153.
Narrative Methods Textbook referenced in
podcast
Narrative
Methods for the Human Sciences
A few Dignity Therapy- Harvey Max Chochinov links
https://dignityincare.ca/en/about-us.html
About us - Dignity in
Care
https://dignityincare.ca/en/about-us.html
Research Team - Dignity in
Care
https://dignityincare.ca/en/research-team.html
Other links:
Curiosity by Faith
Fitgerald
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/full/10.7326/0003-4819-130-1-199901050-00015
Eric’s blog post on Dignity
Therapy from 2011
https://geripal.org/study-of-dignity-therapy-on-distress/
