Pitt Pediatrics congratulates Alison Fleischer, MD and Andrew Buchert, MD for their recent publication in Pediatrics addressing the development of actionable interventions to increase effective communication between hospitalized patients and families and their providers.
Fleischer is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics in our Paul C. Gaffney Division of Pediatric Hospital Medicine (PHM) as well as the Medical Director of Utilization Review and Care Management at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. Buchert is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics in PHM, and also serves as the Medical Director of Clinical Resource Management for Children’s Hospital, and the Associate Medical Director for GME Quality and Safety.
This publication, titled, “‘Listening Neglect’: A Mixed-Methods Study of How Families Feel Unheard in Hospitals,” emphasizes the importance of listening as an essential driver of communication and therefore patient safety. Collecting data from pediatric inpatient units across eight US hospitals, researchers from these multiple institutions evaluated comments from patients and families pertaining to feeling unheard and developed further subthemes in their analysis.
Overall, the research group interviewed 1375 patients and families and identified reports of feeling unheard, as well as subthemes of disrespectful behavior from staff, dismissive attitudes toward patient preferences, concerns, questions, and symptoms, a failure to use interpretation or translation services, underdelivering on services, inflexibility in applying policies, and families resorting to escalating concerns simply to be heard. Collectively, the researchers created the term “listening neglect” to describe the identified experiences of feeling unheard in hospitals.
Ultimately, this research demonstrated that listening neglect existed across staff disciplines and throughout many institutions, which can unfortunately affect levels and quality of care. Study authors determined that hospital systems-level and clinician-level interventions are needed to address staff burnout and promote active listening, effective communication, and patient and family-centered care.
Join us in congratulating Drs. Fleischer and Buchert for being a part of this critical research demonstrating the importance of listening and communication to promote patient care. And follow Pitt Pediatrics on Bluesky for future updates on faculty publications and research.