Earning Trust Through Empathy as a Young Interventionalist: “Is This Your First Time Doing This?”

The following are the fundamental elements of effective communication in physician/patient encounters: establishing a connection by encouraging the patients to participate in decision making; exploring their beliefs, concerns, and expectations; acknowledging their ideas, feelings, values, and priorities in their lives; using nonmedical terms to explain complicated medical procedures; clarifying and summarizing information; checking for understanding; encouraging questions; and most importantly, maintaining humility while doing all these elements (6-8).Interventional cardiology has one of the longest apprenticeships of any medical specialty; by the time an interventional cardiologist begins practicing, he or she has completed between 7 and 9 years of post-graduate training, with 1 to 3 years spent learning the skills needed to work in the cardiac catheterization laboratory.The relationship with malpractice claims among primary care physicians and surgeonsJAMA2771997553559R.A.ShenolikarR.BalkrishnanM.A.HallHow patient-physician encounters in critical medical situations affect trust: results of a national surveyBMC Health Services Res4200424S.D.PearsonL.H.RaekePatients' trust in physicians: many theories, few measures, and little dataJ Gen Intern Med152000509513Atianzar K. Be a HOT Interventionalist with honest, open, two-way communication.The relationship with malpractice claims among primary care physicians and surgeons, JAMA, Vol. 277, 1997, 553-559 3 R.A. Shenolikar, R. Balkrishnan, M.A. Hall, How patient-physician encounters in critical medical situations affect trust: results of a national survey, BMC Health Services Res, Vol. 4, 2004, 24 4 S.D. Pearson, L.H. Raeke, J Gen Intern Med, Vol. 15, 2000, 509-513 5 Atianzar K. Be a HOT Interventionalist with honest, open, two-way communication.