Verna Yiu, , president and CEO of Alberta Health Services, will be giving a free public lecture at UAlberta on January 29 to discuss the power of storytelling in medicine.
Verna Yiu, MD '86, knows the best way to provide care to babies with chronic kidney failure is to get to know their families.
"We have to understand the story of the patient and the family," said Yiu, a pediatric nephrologist, president and CEO of Alberta Health Services (AHS). "We need to know what challenges the family may face looking after a baby on dialysis."
For Yiu, the art of medicine and healing isn't about technology, but the human-to-human interactions and the trust clinicians build with patients and their families. "We provide the best care when we know what matters to patients and their families....We need to understand the personal situation to provide holistic care-when we don't have the complete story and we only focus on the technology, therapeutics and diagnostics, we lose the bigger picture."
Yiu trained as a medical student at the University of Alberta in a team-based environment with patient-focused care, and she says that has been ingrained in the way she approaches her medical practice by focusing on getting to know the families she treats.
Every patient has a story
At the core of Yiu's vision for AHS is a 'Patient First Strategy' that includes sharing a series of patient stories on YouTube. Patients are at the table during the video-making process to plan and ensure their voices are represented. The digital storytelling platform makes materials accessible to everyone with other tools developed for different units to bring storytelling into team-based practices.
"Storytelling helps us bring a human face to the disease. It helps clinicians understand that when we talk about Mrs. Smith in Unit 34, it's not that she has diabetes with hypertension and cardiac failure, but that she's a grandmother of five and a retired teacher," said Yiu. "At the end of the day, I think that it's human touch that inspires better humanistic care, which is the whole aim of the storytelling component."
Yiu's first storytelling in health care was set at the U of A
Yiu's passion for storytelling in medicine stems back to 2000s when she was the Assistant dean for Student Affairs (2000-2008) and later as Interim Dean (2011-2012) for the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry at the University of Alberta. She wanted to bring the humanities and humanism back into focus for medical students and trainees/faculty, so she worked with Pamela Brett-MacLean to create the Arts & Humanities in Health & Medicine (AHHM) program in 2006. The AHHM program aims to create a balance of science and the humanities within the faculty to foster the development of well-rounded health professionals who are skilled, caring, reflexive and compassionate practitioners. The programming helps students and the community explore the many relationships that exist between the arts, humanities, social sciences and medicine.
"I saw the students being inundated with information and knowledge, but I felt we were losing humanism and connection with patients," said Yiu. "Often times there is a very impersonal aspect that is relayed when we talk about patients, so I felt that storytelling was a way to bring the connection to patients and relationships back to the forefront."
When she joined AHS in 2012, it was a natural progression to bring a new emphasis on storytelling to the organization. Yiu wanted to bring the same experiences the AHHM program offers to medical students and trainees to the health providers and professionals at AHS.
Every health-care provider has a story too
Event information
Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry presents: The Power of Storytelling to Improve Healthcare
Monday, January 29, 2018
6:30 to 8 p.m.
Bernard Snell Hall Walter C. Mackenzie Health Sciences Centre
University of Alberta Hospital 8440 112th Street, Edmonton, AB
Featuring Verna Yiu President & CEO, Alberta Health Services Professor of Pediatrics and Former interim Dean, Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry, University of Alberta University of Alberta and Harvard University Alumna Everyone is welcome. Admission is free. Please RSVP
Yiu recognizes that working in health care is stressful. Physicians sometimes cope with stress by dehumanizing situations. Storytelling and narrative reflective practice are not about getting physicians so involved that they burn out because of the emotional stresses that can happen when you are very emotionally connected, it's about understanding and empathizing with what it does mean to get sick.
Yui says storytelling can help remind health-care providers why they went into the field in the first place and can bring back the motivation and compassion. Yiu believes storytelling is also important for non-clinical AHS staff.
"I've always said it doesn't matter where in the organization you are. Whether you're an executive, in corporate services or on the frontline clinical services like the wards, all of our work touches patients. Empathy is a huge component of storytelling. It's about understanding that we are all patients and families ourselves. We should always treat patients how we would want our own family members to be treated," said Yiu.
Yiu goes back to a phrase she often repeats: "When we see patients we usually ask 'what's the matter with you?' when we should be really asking: 'what matters to you?'"
What's the matter with patients from a medical perspective could be quite different from what matters most to them what will shape their care. Until a health-care provider understands what matters to a patient, the treatment they recommend may never work. If the recommended treatment interferes too much with their lifestyle or goals in life, it is not the right treatment for them.
"We have to understand the patient's story to truly be mindful practitioners."
Verna Yiu will be giving a free public lecture at UAlberta on January 29 to discuss the power of storytelling in medicine.