Most people think of surgeons as more disconnected from their patients than other fields, something we saw in the video where the neurosurgeon didn’t communicate well with the patient or his family. Even among many of the students I know who want to be surgeons, they believe that if they are skilled enough at their job, they don’t need to have a great relationship with their patient because only the results matter. However, when we realize error is inevitable, we see that while the results may go the way we did not intend, we can almost always still have that open and honest relationship with our patient that can help us move forward after the error has happened. The surgeons I look up to the most rebuke the idea of skill over connection, saying that they need to have the best relationships with their patients because of how invasive they are with them. Attitudes need to change to prioritizing relationships with patients and not focusing so much on skill and productivity, as important as those are.
