Jeffrey H. Burack

Teaching compassion and respect. Attending physicians' responses to problematic behaviors.

OBJECTIVE: To describe how and why attending physicians respond to learner behaviors that indicate negative attitudes toward patients.SETTING: Inpatient general internal medicine service of a university-affiliated public hospital.PARTICIPANTS: Four ward teams, each including an attending physician, a senior medicine resident, two interns, and up to three medical students.DESIGN: Teams were studied using participant observation of rounds (160 hours); in-depth semistructured interviews (n=23); a structured task involving thinking aloud (n=4, attending physicians); and patient chart review. Codes, themes, and hypotheses were identified from transcripts and field notes, and iteratively tested by blinded within-case and cross-case comparisons.MAIN RESULTS: Attending physicians identified three categories of potentially problematic behaviors: showing disrespect for patients, cutting corners, and outright hostility or rudeness. Attending physicians were rarely observed to respond to these problematic behaviors. When they did, they favored passive nonverbal gestures such as rigid posture, failing to smile, or remaining silent. Verbal responses included three techniques that avoided blaming learners: humor, referring to learners’ self-interest, and medicalizing interpersonal issues. Attending physicians did not explicitly discuss attitudes, refer to moral or professional norms, “lay down the law,” or call attention to their modeling, and rarely gave behavior-specific feedback. Reasons for not responding included lack of opportunity to observe interactions, sympathy for learner stress, and the unpleasantness, perceived ineffectiveness, and lack of professional reward for giving negative feedback.CONCLUSIONS: Because of uncertainty about appropriateness and effectiveness, attending physicians were reluctant to respond to perceived disrespect, uncaring, or hostility toward patients by members of their medical team. They tended to avoid, rationalize, or medicalize these behaviors, and to respond in ways that avoided moral language, did not address underlying attitudes, and left room for face-saving reinterpretations. Although these oblique techniques are sympathetically motivated, learners in stressful clinical environments may misinterpret, undervalue, or entirely fail to notice such subtle feedback.

Doubt and belief in physicians' ability to prognosticate during critical illness: The perspective of surrogate decision makers

Objectives:Although discussing a prognosis is a duty of physicians caring for critically ill patients, little is known about surrogate decision-makers’ beliefs about physicians’ ability to prognosticate. We sought to determine: 1) surrogates’ beliefs about whether physicians can accurately prognosticate for critically ill patients; and 2) how individuals use prognostic information in their role as surrogate decision-makers. Design, Setting, and Patients:Multicenter study in intensive care units of a public hospital, a tertiary care hospital, and a veterans’ hospital. We conducted semistructured interviews with 50 surrogate decision-makers of critically ill patients. We analyzed the interview transcripts using grounded theory methods to inductively develop a framework to describe surrogates’ beliefs about physicians’ ability to prognosticate. Validation methods included triangulation by multidisciplinary analysis and member checking. Measurements and Main Results:Overall, 88% (44 of 50) of surrogates expressed doubt about physicians’ ability to prognosticate for critically ill patients. Four distinct themes emerged that explained surrogates’ doubts about prognostic accuracy: a belief that God could alter the course of the illness, a belief that predicting the future is inherently uncertain, prior experiences where physicians’ prognostications were inaccurate, and experiences with prognostication during the patients intensive care unit stay. Participants also identified several factors that led to belief in physicians’ prognostications, such as receiving similar prognostic estimates from multiple physicians and prior experiences with accurate prognostication. Surrogates’ doubts about prognostic accuracy did not prevent them from wanting prognostic information. Instead, most surrogate decision-makers view physicians’ prognostications as rough estimates that are valuable in informing decisions, but are not determinative. Surrogates identified the act of prognostic disclosure as a key step in preparing emotionally and practically for the possibility that a patient may not survive. Conclusions:Although many surrogate decision-makers harbor some doubt about the accuracy of physicians’ prognostications, they highly value discussions about prognosis and use the information for multiple purposes.

Education in Ambulatory Settings: Developing Valid Measures of Educational Outcomes, and Other Research Priorities.

Efforts to redesign education in ambulatory settings are hampered by a lack of rigorous and coherent research on the learning process in these settings and the desired outcomes of the educational experiences. The authors present 13 priority research topics and 51 important research questions concerning education in ambulatory settings that were defined by a distinguished group of medical educators, clinicians, and policymakers who attended an invitational conference on education in ambulatory settings in 1996. The need to establish valid and reliable measures of quality and outcomes of educational programs and instructional interventions stood out as the major prerequisite for conducting research on education in ambulatory settings. Issues of theory building, research priorities, and research design are discussed, and policy recommendations are made for the development of valid measures of educational outcomes. The creation of a “Medical Education Outcomes Commission” is proposed to act as a repository for measures and instruments, and to provide the field with mechanism to validate instruments and uniform recommendations to conduct studies of quality. The authors urge funding agencies with missions that support medical education to invest in basic research on the outcomes of education in ambulatory settings.

Stigma and Psychological Distress in People With HIV/AIDS

Using a community sample of 197 people living with HIV/AIDS, we examined how awareness of societal stigma (felt stigma) and negative feelings toward oneself as a member of a stigmatized group (self-stigma) are related to psychological well-being. Both felt stigma and self-stigma were significantly correlated with symptoms of depression and anxiety, but controlling for felt stigma reduced self-stigmas association with depressive symptoms to nonsignificance. Global self-esteem and social avoidance fully mediated the associations between self-stigma and distress but only partially mediated the associations between felt stigma and distress. Felt stigma mediated the relationship between distress and HIV-related changes in physical appearance.

Diagnostic lumbar puncture in HIV-infected patients: analysis of 138 cases.

PURPOSE This study was designed to describe the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) findings and neurologic diagnoses observed in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-infected adults undergoing diagnostic lumbar puncture (LP) and to correlate the results of LP with indications and CD4 counts. DESIGN Retrospective cross-sectional chart review study. SETTING University hospital clinic for patients with HIV infection. PATIENTS All patients of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) AIDS Clinic who underwent LP between mid-1987 and mid-1990 for headache, fever, altered mental status, or a combination of these indications. Sixty-seven percent had an AIDS diagnosis at the time of LP; the median CD4 count was 0.091 x 10(9)/L. RESULTS A total of 138 LPs was analyzed. Elevation of CSF protein and leukocytes occurred in 33% and 27% of specimens, respectively. Seventy-two new neurologic diagnoses were established in 67 patients, but only 30 diagnoses were the result of CSF analysis. Of these 30 diagnoses, 18 were of aseptic meningitis attributed to HIV. None of the 12 treatable diagnoses established by LP occurred in patients known to have a CD4 count of 0.200 x 10(9)/L or greater. Patients undergoing LP because of headache had a lower incidence of new diagnoses than those with altered mental status (35% versus 72%), but LP revealed a higher proportion of diagnoses in the group with headache. CONCLUSIONS CSF abnormalities were common at all stages of disease. LP was diagnostic in 22% of cases, but fewer than half of the diagnoses were of treatable secondary complications. Patients with a CD4 count higher than 0.200 x 10(9) have a very low incidence of opportunistic complications. The relatively low yield of LP in patients with altered mental status suggests that other testing modalities should be used prior to LP.

The shift to primary care: emerging influences on specialty choice.

No abstract available.