How much does a physician really need to know about their patient?
Dr. Hemming's answer? “Enough.”
GIM Assistant Professor of Medicine, Dr. Patrick Hemming, contributed an opinion piece published on the John Hopkins University's CLOSLER (Moving Closer to Osler) website and newsletter, entitled Seeing Your Patients Through New Perspectives.
In the article, Hemming explains how trainees often struggle with the battle between listening to their patients and not slowing down the clinic, remembering a personal example from when he was in residency.
"When we give space for the perspective of life story, we provide context to the visit. This is a larger concept than 'social history,' which is often crammed in a visit between asking about allergies and whether anyone else in the family has had cancer."
Click here to read the full article on the CLOSLER website.
Dr. Hemming completed internal medicine residency at Hopkins and earned the MPH degree from Johns Hopkins University. He joined the faculty at Duke in 2015. Dr. Hemming continues to build his knowledgebase and to contribute to the field of medical education. Last month he was the GIM recipient of the annual Department of Medicine award for Excellence in Education. Currently he is an education scholar in the Faculty Development Academy sponsored by Duke AHEAD. In March 2018 he published an essay for the SGIM Forum about being a generalist and donor advocate. Earlier, in January 2018, he was lead author of a paper about behavior health providers, published in Patient Education and Counseling. For DGIM we have benefited from his recent blog posts about integrating behavior health services in the Duke Outpatient Clinic. Congratulations Dr. Hemming!