Banner Health teaches empathy communication

Carla Rotering, a pulmonologist at Banner Thunderbird Medical Center in Phoenix, recounted a story when her granddaughter was injured in an accident and needed stitches in the emergency room. The ER doctor began to stitch, and the girl wept, crying out that it hurt, Rotering wrote in a Hospital Impact blog post this week. The physician said that was impossible since the doctor numbed it. Rotering asked the doctor to step out of the room and said, "I am asking you to listen to her and accept her feelings. ... She is the expert on her experience."

The patient experience points to a need for provider communication that focuses on empathy.

Banner Health in Arizona conducts a "language of caring for physicians" program that helps strengthen the spoken and unspoken conversations among the physician, patient and family. --Read the full blog post on Hospital Impact