Company: MedPage Today/Role: (Video) Writer, Producer
The Doctor as Patient:
'I Was Not Trying to Die'
Physician turns near-death experience into hospital empathy program
Rana Awdish, MD, nearly bled to death in the hospital where she worked. She was seven months pregnant when a tumor in her liver ruptured, transforming the critical care medicine fellow into a patient in her own ICU.
From her new perspective as a patient, Awdish was jarred by some of the language that she herself had used as a physician.
"I heard the resident say, 'She's been trying to die on us,'" Awdish recalls in this exclusive MedPage Today video. "And it made me really angry, because as a patient in the bed, I was not trying to die -- I was actually trying very hard not to die."
Awdish, who also wrote about her experience in the New England Journal of Medicine, turned it into an educational program at Henry Ford Health System that focuses on improving physician-patient empathy.
"The first time someone has to tell somebody that their loved one is dying shouldn't be in real life," Awdish said. She expands on her experience and the new program in this exclusive MedPage Today video.