“Just Healing the Body is Not Enough"

“Just Healing the Body is Not Enough,” says HealthCare Chaplaincy in Top Magazine Modern Healthcare

A recent issue of Modern Healthcare, the top-ranked magazine in readership among health care executives, featured an article about the important topic of how to measure quality care in the clinical setting.

HealthCare Chaplaincy’s the Rev. George Handzo responded with a letter to the editor which was published.

He wrote:“(The article) makes some valuable points in defense of patient satisfaction as a quality indicator. There is no argument about whether everyone ought to be held to best practices in clinical care. That said, many of us have seen patients whose diseases are cured but who leave the health care system so dissatisfied that they hesitate to interact with the system the next time they really need to and/or leave with actual social, emotional or spiritual wounds that negatively impact their quality of life.Just healing the body is not enough. Patient satisfaction speaks to the concept that the system needs to attend to all dimensions of the patient’s experience.”