Post 5 — What Excellent Care Actually Looks Like TEAMWORK · CLINICAL LEADERSHIP · HUMAN DIGNITY
An educational series about individualized care, medical complexity, system design, and the human life at the center.
Post 5 — What Excellent Care Actually Looks Like
TEAMWORK · CLINICAL LEADERSHIP · HUMAN DIGNITY
Some of the most important advances in my son’s care began when someone was willing to say, “Let’s understand this better.”
Over more than two decades, we have worked with extraordinary people.
Physicians, nurses, respiratory therapists, rehabilitation specialists, and others who understood that complex care requires collaboration.
People like Dr. Lidsky, Dr. Onders and his diaphragm-pacing team, and the teams at Rainbow Babies and Children in Cleveland and OSU.
Not because any one person knew everything.
But because they were willing to investigate, communicate, and learn.
One respiratory therapist helped identify a higher PEEP setting that could better support Alex under certain circumstances.
Our current nurse, Jenny, brought knowledge about Medipore tape that helped us improve the care of the sensitive skin around Alex’s diaphragm-pacer connection site.
Meanwhile, years of living with Alex’s physiology have given us knowledge about his individual responses that may not appear in a textbook.
These contributions do not compete with one another.
They build on one another.
A nurse who once worked on a trauma team told me something I’ve never forgotten:
You can’t get personally offended. You have to work together as a team.
That is an important lesson in complex medical care.
A professional license matters.
Clinical training matters.
Specialist expertise matters.
The individual’s own observations matter.
And the knowledge developed through years of hands-on care matters.
None of these should automatically invalidate the others.
The goal is not to determine whose knowledge carries the most prestige.
The goal is to bring the necessary knowledge together to protect and improve a human life.
The best care doesn’t require everyone to know everything. It requires everyone to recognize what they don’t know—and work together to find out.
#CollaborativeCare #PatientCenteredCare #ClinicalLeadership #TeamBasedCare #PatientVoice #MedicalComplexity #IndividualizedCare
#BeyondTheCheckbox
#StabilityIsNotSimplicity
#SeeThePersonNotTheCategory
