Broadening Medical Students' Exposure to the Range of Illness Experiences: A Pilot Curriculum Focused on Depression Education.

Problem: Exposing medical students to a broad range of illness experiences is crucial for teaching them to practice patient-centered care, but students often have limited interaction with patients with diverse illness presentations.

Approach: The authors developed, implemented, and evaluated a self-directed online curriculum followed by a small-group discussion focused on depression education. The curriculum was based on a module created using the Database of Individual Patients' Experiences methodology.

Vital Directions for Health and Health Care: Priorities From a National Academy of Medicine Initiative.

Importance: Recent discussion has focused on questions related to the repeal and replacement of portions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). However, issues central to the future of health and health care in the United States transcend the ACA provisions receiving the greatest attention. Initiatives directed to certain strategic and infrastructure priorities are vital to achieve better health at lower cost.

The Charter on Professionalism for Health Care Organizations.

In 2002, the Physician Charter on Medical Professionalism was published to provide physicians with guidance for decision making in a rapidly changing environment. Feedback from physicians indicated that they were unable to fully live up to the principles in the 2002 charter partly because of their employing or affiliated health care organizations. A multistakeholder group has developed a Charter on Professionalism for Health Care Organizations, which may provide more guidance than charters for individual disciplines, given the current structure of health care delivery systems.

Integrating Compassionate, Collaborative Care (the "Triple C") Into Health Professional Education to Advance the Triple Aim of Health Care.

Empathy and compassion provide an important foundation for effective collaboration in health care. Compassion (the recognition of and response to the distress and suffering of others) should be consistently offered by health care professionals to patients, families, staff, and one another. However, compassion without collaboration may result in uncoordinated care, while collaboration without compassion may result in technically correct but depersonalized care that fails to meet the unique emotional and psychosocial needs of all involved.

Breast Cancer Survivor Advocacy at a University Hospital: Development of a Peer Support Program with Evaluation by Patients, Advocates, and Clinicians.

Peer-to-peer support programs provide unique psychosocial and educational support for breast cancer patients. A Patient Survivor Advocacy (PSA) program was developed by the University of Wisconsin Breast Center (UWBC) to provide support for newly diagnosed patients from peers who had completed primary treatment. In this study, we evaluated patient, advocate, and clinician experience with the PSA program.

"Best Case/Worst Case": Qualitative Evaluation of a Novel Communication Tool for Difficult in-the-Moment Surgical Decisions.

Objectives: To evaluate a communication tool called "Best Case/Worst Case" (BC/WC) based on an established conceptual model of shared decision-making.

Design: Focus group study.

Setting: Older adults (four focus groups) and surgeons (two focus groups) using modified questions from the Decision Aid Acceptability Scale and the Decisional Conflict Scale to evaluate and revise the communication tool.

Constructing High-stakes Surgical Decisions: It's Better to Die Trying.

Objective: To explore high-stakes surgical decision making from the perspective of seniors and surgeons.

Background: A majority of older chronically ill patients would decline a low-risk procedure if the outcome was severe functional impairment. However, 25% of Medicare beneficiaries have surgery in their last 3 months of life, which may be inconsistent with their preferences.

Recommended patient-reported core set of symptoms and quality-of-life domains to measure in ovarian cancer treatment trials.

There is no consensus as to what symptoms or quality-of-life (QOL) domains should be measured as patient-reported outcomes (PROs) in ovarian cancer clinical trials. A panel of experts convened by the National Cancer Institute reviewed studies published between January 2000 and August 2011. The results were included in and combined with an expert consensus-building process to identify the most salient PROs for ovarian cancer clinical trials.

Engaging Patients at the Front Lines of Primary Care Redesign: Operational Lessons for an Effective Program.

Unlabelled: Article-at-a-Glance Background: The lack of patient engagement in quality improvement is concerning. As part of an enterprisewide initiative to redesign primary care at UW Health, interdisciplinary primary care teams received training in patient engagement.

Methods: Organizational stakeholders held a structured discussion and used nominal group technique to identify the key components critical to fostering a culture of patient engagement and critical lessons learned.

A survey to examine patient awareness, knowledge, and perceptions regarding the risks and consequences of surgical site infections.

We surveyed patients to determine awareness and knowledge regarding risks and consequences of and prevention of surgical site infection (SSI), and we found that 26% of respondents thought that education for SSI prevention could be improved and that 16% could not recall discussing SSI risks and prevention with a health care worker at all. Only 60% of patients recalled receiving an informational flyer in the hospital. Our results show that better educational and engagement interventions incorporating patient preferences are needed to promote awareness and patient engagement regarding SSI prevention.

Engaging patients in the prevention of health care-associated infections: a survey of patients' awareness, knowledge, and perceptions regarding the risks and consequences of infection with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and Clostridium difficile.

Background And Objective: Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections and Clostridium difficile infections (CDI) are major health care-associated infections (HAIs). Little is known about patients' knowledge of these HAIs. Therefore, we surveyed patients to determine awareness, knowledge, and perceptions of MRSA infections and CDI.