Patient Care & Self-Care Skills
Practicing medicine is fulfilling, while also having proximity to a great deal of suffering. While medical education has kept up with knowledge to address cutting edge treatments, it does not routinely incorporate training to address suffering.
Compassion is a practice that acknowledges suffering and meets it with skillful action. While it can be innate for some people, it can also be learned as a skill set.
Explore Compassion Moments to integrate skills into clinical encounters and self-care. You can start at this Overview or see how skills can be integrated into interactions and clinical reasoning via the SOAP format used by many healthcare professionals.
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Subjective
How do we bring non-judgmental awareness into our clinical day?
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Objective
How can we embody compassion in our interactions?
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Assessment
How can we bring humility and common humanity into clinical reasoning?
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Plan
How do we identify the most skillful action to take?
About Me
I am Sonja Raaum, MD FACP, a hospitalist and medical educator at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. My professional goal is to train competent and compassionate physicians.
As part of the 2022 cohort in Applied Compassion Training provided by the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, I developed practical skills in compassion. I have worked to translate these to clinical care and the hectic lives of healthcare professionals. I hope you enjoy exploring this content and that it helps you find more moments of compassion in your clinical work!
