As a provider who's not a doctor, I started to have this feeling of if this happened, if when this happens to me, to my family, I'm going to think I want to hear you tell me the way that you're talking about it in the break room or behind the scenes. And what I joke is doctors often when they're with families, they give the NPR story, which is really, really long. It doesn't have interpretation with that. The family has to sort of impute. They have to sort of guess from the tone and what the clinicians are saying, what it means. "That feels unfair to me," she says.
‘I’ve got bad news’ is a sentence no one wants to hear. But at some point, all of us will either have to deliver bad news or will be on the receiving end. So what can make these gut-wrenching conversations go less horribly? On this episode of How To!, co-host Amanda Ripley brings in Dr. Robert Arnold, co-founder of Vital Talk, and Maura, a social worker at a level one trauma center to talk about how to better communicate serious news. Because just about all of us can get a lot better at it — once we learn how.
If you liked this episode, check out: “How To Solve Your Own Medical Mystery.”
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Podcast production by Derek John, Rosemary Belson, Kevin Bendis, and Jabari Butler.
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