No matter where your medical career takes you, you will most likely encounter patients facing barriers to accessing health care. Everyone needs to prepare to care for underserved patients.
Erwin C. Wang, MHA, Megan Prior, Jenny M. Van Kirk, Stephen A. Sarmiento, Margaret M. Burke, MS, Christine Oh, MS, Eileen S. Moore, MD, and Stephen Ray Mitchell, MD
Policies and systems are slow to resolve structural disparities in access to insurance coverage and health care, but physicians can act now.
Shannon U. Waterman, MD, Amanda Kost, MD, Rachel Lazzar, MSW, and Sharon Dobie, MD, MCP
The Underserved Pathway at the University of Washington School of Medicine helps prepare future physicians to work with underserved populations by providing a foundation of practical knowledge and real-world experiences.
Physicians have an ethical responsibility to be functionally literate in health statistics and able to explain information such as a test’s positive predictive value to their patients.
Clinical and psychosocial considerations influence how oncologists approach discussing sperm banking with adolescent patients who are about to undergo chemotherapy and with the parents of those patients.
Suggests to medical students what forms of self-disclosure are acceptable during clinical encounters and when self-disclosure might be interpreted by patients as taking attention away from them.
This commentary examines the consequences of a medical student’s dishonesty during clinical rounds when she lacked the lab results the attending physician asked her for.
Suggests to medical students what forms of self-disclosure are acceptable during clinical encounters and when self-disclosure might be interpreted by patients as taking attention away from them.