A patient arrives for a follow-up appointment, but managing their diabetes isn’t the biggest challenge. They don’t know where they’re going to sleep next week. Another patient skips their needed medications because they have to choose between prescriptions and groceries. For physicians and trainees, these situations raise an important question: What role should clinicians play… Read more »
“Your test results show that you have Type 2 diabetes,” John said gently to his patient, Ana. “I’d like to start you on a daily medication – to be taken with a meal – to help manage it.” “I don’t have insurance,” Ana said quietly. John paused. His population health training had educated him for… Read more »
By the time I met her, she had lived with diarrhea for nearly six months. She was 59, a health care worker, and had been hospitalized several times since symptoms began shortly after a left heart catheterization. Each visit added testing and imaging, yet no answers followed. When we entered her room, she told her… Read more »
The first thing I noticed at the Good Samaritan Clinic was how quiet the waiting room was. Not the calm kind of quiet, but the kind that comes from people holding themselves together. Patients sat with paperwork folded carefully in their hands, eyes lowered, bodies angled inward. This was not a place where trust arrived… Read more »
The chart said twenty-two. I read it the way you reread a sentence that can’t be right. Twenty-two admissions for diabetic ketoacidosis in ten months. Our patient, our hospital. Twenty-two times we fixed the glucose, restarted insulin, let him go. I’ll call him Marcus. This was twenty-three. The nurse’s voice came through wryly, laden with… Read more »
