Dozens of LSU Health Shreveport medical school students will be inquiring more about patients’ personal lives over the next two weeks as part of a nationwide initiative called “Tell Me More.”
Beginning Monday, medical school students will interview consenting patients hospitalized at University Health to more fully understand them as individuals. Fourth year medical student Lindsey Tassin is pursuing family medicine and heading up this project.
“We’re starting them off with some questions, such as: How would your family and friends describe you? What do you love to do when you’re at home? What is something you struggle with and how do you deal with that? We’re hoping that will spark a conversation with them,” Tassin said, adding some residency students will also participate.
Patients who participate will have a poster taped above their hospital bed in which they disclose three things about their personal life. Tassin says this information will be conversation starters for the medical school students in an effort to promote compassionate care in medicine. Tassin says so often physicians only ask questions focused on disease diagnosis.
“It’s not putting above the patient’s bed diabetes or kidney disease. Nobody wants to be labeled by their ailment. Sometimes, patients I think when that’s all you ask them about that’s how they’re feeling that all they are is cancer,” Tassin said.
This project was developed two years ago by students at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. Last year, more than 85 chapters of the Gold Humanism Honor Society participated in “Tell Me More.”
Plans are underway at LSU Health Shreveport to establish a chapter of the society, which is sponsored by the Arnold P. Gold Foundation working to promote compassionate care in medicine. The campaign runs through Feb. 26.
