Efficiency and Compassion

Definitions

1. Efficiency: Accomplishing work without wasting time, effort, or resources.
2. Compassion: Understanding another person's particular suffering and responding to their good.
3. A fitting balance: Pursuing efficiency alongside compassion, with healing as the purpose that guides both.

What Are Efficiency and Compassion?

Efficient work can serve patients, but speed alone does not determine good care. Compassion attends to the patient's circumstances and to goods that extend beyond a narrowly medical problem. Competence, practical judgment, and personal attention are needed together to decide what this patient requires.

Why Should We Practice Efficiency and Compassion?

• The patient's good: A quick solution may leave important personal or spiritual concerns unheard.
• Individual judgment: Patients' different circumstances require attention beyond a uniform workflow.
• Professional formation: What a workplace rewards can shape the ideals clinicians learn to pursue.
• Purpose: Keeping healing in view prevents completion of tasks from becoming the measure of every encounter.

How Do We Practice Efficiency and Compassion?

1. Examine your priorities: Notice when speed displaces compassion.
2. Listen for the particular need: Ask what matters to the patient.
3. Use practical judgment: Judge when extra time is needed and when an efficient approach serves care.
4. Reduce avoidable waste: Improve routines to leave time for patients.
5. Correct an imbalance: Practice a neglected ideal and review the change.

Clinical Case

You are on your Family Medicine rotation as a third year medical student. Your precepting attending Dr. Swift runs a busy practice, and he double-books his appointments, so he often sends you to see a patient on your own while he sees a different patient. He then has you present the patient you saw to him, so that he can zip into the room and wrap up the visit while you write the note for the encounter.

An older patient, Mr. Jimmy, is coming in with the chief complaint of a new mole on his back. As you are heading to the patient’s room, Dr. Swift lets you know that if you think the mole looks suspicious, the plan will be to do a biopsy in the procedure room as part of today’s visit. Dr. Speed hands you a procedure consent form, instructing you to get consent for the procedure while you’re in the room.

You go into Mr. Jimmy’s room and start taking his history. Mr. Jimmy tells you he recently retired from a very busy career. You attempt to direct the conversation to the suspicious mole that brought him in, and he shows you a spot on his upper back which looks completely normal to you. Mr. Jimmy is relieved to hear that you don’t think it looks like cancer, and as you’re trying to politely exit the room, he shares with you that his work kept him feeling like he had a sense of purpose after his wife died a few years ago, but now that he is retired, he feels like he is mourning her loss all over again, and he’s starting to ask himself what his life has meant, whether God exists, and other big questions. You decide that as a medical student, you can take a few extra minutes with Mr. Jimmy to talk to him about these big questions, so you sit back down and have a thoughtful conversation. When you get up to leave the room again, Mr. Jimmy tears up. He thanks you for being a good listener and tells you that you’re going to make a great doctor.

You walk out of the room and find Dr. Swift pacing outside the door. He looks at the blank consent form in your hand and shakes his head in frustration, exclaiming, “Are you kidding me? You just spent half an hour in that room, and you’re going to tell me he doesn’t need a biopsy? I set up the procedure room while you were in there!”

Sources: LearnWorlds outline; Canva one-pager, page 16.