providing time to care in health-care.

 by Ken Hamilton, MD ~ Spring 2006 Edition

Medicine today is under a great deal of pressure that comes from external social forces which deprive both the patient and the health-care provider the space and time in which to enter into caring, constructive, therapeutic relationships. The result is an increase in patient dissatisfaction and provider frustration... malpractice suits and burnout. Without any immediate changes in our society, we must at this time be able to increase the time and space we can give our patients. HOPE Groups provide just that time and space, especially when they become a clinical service of the practice or institution.

HOPE Groups stand out for their safety and caring. They stand out for their orientation to health and the personal discovery of meaning, value, and purpose. They stand out for the qualities of the person who guides the group in its exploration of change and growth—a mature, empathic person who is capable of focusing self and others away from disease and toward health. Such a person, a “HOPE Group guide,” must be willing to leave concepts and practices of therapy at the meeting room door and pick up the practice of guiding.

HOPE is currently involved in a qualitative study of HOPE Groups and HOPE Group guides. Nineteen years of experience with over 4000 HOPE Group meetings have revealed certain qualities of HOPE Group guides: They focus on potential. Their empathy referred to above is at the level of compassion. They evoke personal stories by being safe and fearless to the point of being boundaryless. They have excellent listening skills that makes it possible for them to give a patient’s story back to the patient in such a way that the patient hears new things in the story. They are kind. They are caring. They are healthy... any disease is behind them.

Whereas a therapist treats an illness, disease, or disability, a guide conducts, models, informs, reflects, encourages, and affirms a life’s process. Therapy works with the model of “what’s wrong?” “what caused it?” and “what can we do to change or fix it?” This model has specific applications pretty well limited to problem-solving on the level at which the problem developed; it works quite well for mechanical things that are broken. It does not work with living systems; for no systems problem can be solved at the level at which it was created.

Does it pay, then, to focus on the problem or the solution? Psychologists are well aware that “what we focus on expands.” The same can be said for all great leaders, for they know that “we become what we think about most of the time.” We must remember to search for our solutions at a higher level of consciousness. HOPE’s teachers and experience consistently demonstrate that the solution comes from focusing on that which gives life meaning, value, and purpose. The effect of choosing this focus empowers therapies—it evokes the placebo response (that deserves to be put back into all therapies from which it was removed for study purposes). HOPE Groups focus on helping people make these healthy choices.

HOPE’s experience has revealed a high incidence of patients talking about their therapies and changes that they would like to make therein. HOPE’s response has always been to encourage these people to take their concerns back to their health-care providers. When they do, the response has invariably been supportive and beneficial… to both patient and provider. HOPE’s experience in these instances reveals a tendency for the patient to appreciate an increased caring from their provider. This suggests that a HOPE Group can provide a direct connection between patients and health-care providers.

This connection would come as a direct result of creating HOPE Groups as clinical services in doctor’s offices and hospitals—billable services.

In order for such a connection to develop, the HOPE Group guide would have to be a licensed health care provider from the practice or the institution. Such an individual would be subject to all of the ethical concerns of professionalism and would thus serve as a direct conduit of clinically valuable information between the patient and the health-care service.

HOPE’s contribution to the effectiveness of such clinical services would comprise the selection and training of the HOPE Group guides and the provision of ongoing support for the guide and the institution.

In summary, HOPE Groups as clinical services would provide safe places in which groups of patients could discuss their therapies and their relationships with their health-care providers in the context of HOPE’s time-proven effectiveness in helping people focus on that course of life which gives the greatest richness and meaning.

Finally, HOPE believes that health care reform occurs when health-care comes to care for the health of those whom it serves. HOPE clinical services would facilitate that reform.
 

Do you have a story or anecdote you would like to share with the readers of Ripples? Please send it to Ken at HOPE PO Box 276, S. Paris, ME 04281.

We would love to have your HOPE story for Ripples! Please send it to the HOPE office, PO Box 276, South Paris, ME 04281 or email it to hope-at-hopehealing.org. If you don't think you are a writer, record it onto a tape and send that to the office. The editor will transcribe and edit it for you!