| Description |
It has long been understood that empathy, interprofessional teamwork, and a strong sense of community within the workplace are all components of an effective health care team (Hojat et al., 2015). These characteristics work together to improve the patient experience, which ultimately can have a positive influence on patient outcomes (Jubraj et al., 2016). While these factors are clearly of the utmost importance to quality patient care, they are not always successfully promoted within medical organizations (Joiner, 1996). Even if an institution desires to support their staff, the formats they choose to utilize are often outdated and under-utilized by staff (Poonia & Rajasekaran, 2020).As health care systems recognize the importance of empathy, interprofessional teamwork, and a sense of community, for the good of their staff and their patients, they must begin to think about how best to encourage growth in these areas among their employees. Clinical narratives are one such approach to this problem. Clinical narratives are the sharing of stories, both medicaland personal, between providers, nurses, and other members of the health care team as a means to promote compassion and camaraderie (Small et al., 2017). This storytelling gives staff insights into their own profession as well as the unique roles of their interdisciplinary team (Small et al., 2017). In addition to this, it also develops empathy, personal confidence, and a better understanding of the patient experience (Jubrai et al., 2016; Wadsworth et al., 2017; Yuen, 2013). All of these attributes contribute to both the clinicians' overall sense of well-being as well as their ability to provide effective, quality patient care (Small et al., 2017; Hojat et al., 2015).While there are many ways to approach clinical narratives, institutions must consider accessibility and efficacy for their staff. Podcasting is a method of communication that has been growing in popularity and is showing promising results (Kleinpell et al., 2020). Not only does this format allow for widely accessible clinical narrative storytelling, but through the use of these stories, it is also an effective way to disperse updates on best practices and approaches to patient-centered care (Kleinpell et al., 2017; Moult, 2009). The use of podcasting to share clinical narrative stories is an effective way to disperse these accounts as it makes them easily accessible by staff. This, in turn, improves overall patient care and outcomes by promoting empathy, interprofessional camaraderie, and a sense of community among health care professionals. |
