A: I think the one area that we’re always challenged with—and I think we’ve seen it in the healthcare debate, and I think it’s an appropriate role for us as healthcare providers to pay attention to—is palliative and end-of-life care. I don’t think we’ve done enough work, as a profession, to make sure that we deliver very-high-quality care of patients with chronic and acute catastrophic illnesses.
We need to better understand what the needs of those patients are, to ask them to work with us to set the goals with them, what they want from us.
So I think it’s an opportunity for us to have a real partnership with patients at a critical time in their lives. TH
Bryn Nelson is a freelance medical writer based in Seattle.