Tools for the Healthcare Visit
Making Care Fit
Careful and kind care requires that clinicians go beyond applying guidelines for patients like this to formulate plans of care for this patient. This work must be done in collaboration, with patients and clinicians uncovering, discovering, and co-creating a response that makes sense.
Here we highlight some of the tools and materials we’ve developed over the last 18 years to support patients and clinicians, along with example conversations.
If you are a patient, caregiver or clinician - feel free to try these tools in your own visits. We think that they are good demonstrations of how careful and kind care can happen.
Plan Your Conversations Tool
The Plan Your Conversation cards help patients think through what they’d like to share and “practice” a conversation they’d like to have with the clinician. The cards can be used for any condition or issue and in any care setting.
The cards can also be used by employees and staff to practice a conversation they’d like to have with leadership about how the culture may be impacting the ability to care for patients.
Tell Us About Your Life Tool
This tool was developed in partnership with a primary care practice. It asks four questions about the patient’s life and can be used in any care setting or encounter to help clinicians see their patients in “high definition” and assure that the care plan responds to patients lives and loves.
“During one visit, a patient asked his wife to write his answers as she asked the questions. To the question “where do you find the most joy in your life?” the patient answered, “sex.” His wife laughed, rolled her eyes, and wrote it down. When we shared the document with the patient’s doctor before the visit, he noted, even as he chuckled a bit, that this was actually really helpful. “Many medications have side effects that can affect sexual function,” he said. “Knowing that an active sex life is important to the patient helps me bring that information into any discussion we might have.”
‘Tell Us About Your Life’ Story
Care That Fits
There are numerous communication and shared decision making tools to help patients and clinicians manage situations like medication for diabetes, depression, cardiovascular risk and smoking cessation related to surgery. Visit our research partner, the KER Unit at Mayo Clinic, to find the tools, research, and video examples.
Tools for Depression
Tools for Diabetes
Plan Your Conversations
The Book