Dr. Daniel Ermann: Why Is It Important for You to Empower Patients?
Dr. Daniel Ermann: Why Is It Important for You to Empower Patients? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
What are some methods to empower patients? CLL expert Dr. Daniel Ermann from Huntsman Cancer Institute discusses information that he explains to patients, resources for patients, and how patient empowerment changes their role in their care.
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Transcript:
Dr. Daniel Ermann:
I think empowering patients is, especially with CLL, the most important thing you can do. And I like to do it starting at our very first meeting. So what I do is when I first discuss about their disease, about having CLL, I talk about the very basics. So I like to start with the very basics. What is CLL? What is this disease? How does it work? And over time, I get more and more complex in this discussion with them. And I like to provide them with as much information as possible. So information on how does the disease manage, it’s incurable, what does that mean? Where do we go from whether or not to treat or not treat? If you’re not treating, what other things can you do to optimize their health and well-being?
And I find that starting from the very basics and describing everything in detail, going through all the scenarios with patients and giving them the most up-to-date information on not only the disease, but actually the management strategies is very empowering. They seem to like to take some ownership of their disease. And I give them different resources that they can do that with. And whether that be online resources, the CLL Society, for example, whether it be patient advocacy groups, there are some CLL-specific advocacy groups where our patients will meet outside of a healthcare setting and they’ll meet just CLL patients alone and discuss what’s going on in the field, what’s new in CLL.
And actually they’ll sometimes invite physicians to be guest speakers. And I’m very big in empowering patients to do that and to feel like they have some control over these very scary diseases. I think it’s important because this is an incurable cancer. It’s going to be something that they live with for the rest of their life. And feeling like they have some sort of control and understanding of the disease, is very powerful. I think that having this knowledge base, feeling like they have some information on their disease and be able to take it into their own hands improves their quality of life and improves their kind of knowledge about what to do about the future. And there’s not much more powerful than that.
