Healthcare systems and professionals around the world are so focused on treating disease that they’re losing sight of the people they’re supposed to serve, according to healthcare advocate and author, Gil Bashe.
That was one of the key takeaways from Bashe’s fireside chat with Alastair MacColl yesterday at FINN Partners UK‘s London HQ, where Bashe read excerpts from his bestselling book, Healing the Sick Care System: Why People Matter.
The event was hosted by FINN Partners in partnership with Health Tech World and Health2Tech.
Bashe, who represents FINN Partners as the firm’s chair of global health and purpose, said the inspiration for the book came from experiences in his personal life and his storied career in health policy, communications and military medicine.
Bashe said: “I felt the health systems of developed nations had become sick care systems.
“We are squeezing the passion to heal out of doctors, nurses, pharmacists and technicians.
“We are raising the cost of healing while moving further away from preventing disease in the first place.”
Bashe shared some deeply personal stories that led him to write the book, including his mother’s battle with uterine cancer and his wife’s pregnancy struggles.
Both laid bare the fractured nature of the healthcare system, where siloed clinicians operate under extreme pressure, with patients seen more as carriers of disease rather than whole people.
However, Bashe was keen not to lay the blame on the clinicians themselves.
He said: “Doctors are people. Highly educated and highly trained people, but they’re still people.
“We could improve the health system by remembering our humanity.”
The healthcare advocate highlighted the vital role of patient experience in recovery and wellbeing.
Describing the need for clinicians to take the time to connect with and understand their patients, he said: “We don’t always remember exactly what a doctor said, but we remember how they made us feel.”
As the discussion drew to a close, Bashe reflected on how he manages to stay optimistic for the future of healthcare despite the evident shortcomings laid out in his book.
Ultimately, he said, hope comes down to choice.
Bashe added: “I meet doctors who are incredible human beings. I hold onto hope that their disease of kindness with be contagious. That’s what gives me hope.
“But it’s also up to us to ignite that possibility within them.
“The more we tolerate a system that isn’t built around our humanity, the more we open the door to their unfortunate inhumanity.
“It’s a relationship. We’re tilting way too far to the transactional. We’ve got to pull it back to the relational.”
Healing the Sick Care System: Why People Matter is available from Amazon.
