Flip No. 94

Begin with Heart

A visual commitment to put love first, drives healthcare-wide culture shift

By gapingvoid

We’ve all had that one experience, as a patient or family member worried for a loved one, where we didn’t receive the best care. That pit that sits in your stomach when it happens feels horrible. It removes some amount of humanity. It makes a clinic or hospital seem like their priorities are elsewhere — that their mission is focused on reimbursements or longer wait times or, worse, pure selfishness.

What if your clinic sent a different message to its patients?

The power of an identified culture or mission can convert an entire building into a living, breathing ecosystem working toward and achieving goals in record time. People who are connected, physically and emotionally, are more likely to act with empathy and greater care. Inspired by the moment a supervising clinician told him to, “treat the problem, not the patient,” gapingvoid‘s Jeffrey Shub inspired a campaign built on empathy to flip that industry mantra and capture the care teams and sites willing to make a lasting commitment to put patients first and begin exchanges in healthcare with heart.


12986942_10103247294263151_2881564778934718578_n(Image by Ted Eytan)

Pilot partners will receive copies of the gapingvoid print, along with details for capturing the team (and patients!) in pictures, joining the conversation at #FliptheClinic. Send us a letter of intent today to pilot this Flip!

Everyone is asked to 1. Be creative! Include entire teams in spirited photos (sharing them on #FliptheClinic, of course), 2. To keep one copy hung in a central location – the waiting room, behind the front receptionist, or perhaps in the hallway so your patients can see it and participate, too, and 3. Keep others in places that will remind you and your staff, every day, about what you’re really there to accomplish.

Are you a patient looking to bring this to your clinic or care team? Send us a note! We’d love to work with you to recognize their role in your life, and bring this opportunity to them through your recommendation.

12977052_10154076846783523_3914691489936886348_o(Image by Ted Eytan)

Gathered at an event on April 14, 2016 with a community of health designers, architects, and several members of the Flip the Clinic community at the Kaiser Permanente Center for Total Health in Washington, D.C.

Result



To-date more than 1,000 posters have been distributed by Flip the Clinic - at Kaiser Permanente Mid-Atlantic's Center for Total Health, Design Connections: Health, and the U.S. Health and Human Services Consumer Summit to the individual clinicians and patients we work with every week.

Hung in offices, exam rooms, hallways, phlebotomy stations, and front desks, the artwork offers everyone a moment to smile and encourages a conversation about its story. "My patient had her blood drawn and came to the exam room asking, 'what's with the heart picture?' and after sharing the story of meeting Flip the Clinic and picking up a poster, I realized we didn't have a great way of telling patients all the effort we were putting into being their clinician beyond the office. We need to change that," one physician shared.

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