One, of many, light bulb moments for me today occurred while discussing reflective practice. Through our day patients are reported out to us by colleagues who have often labeled them. To me this can be similar to the picture that we saw and were asked “what do you see”, followed closely by “how many circles can you count”. As a group we already had the bias in our mind of what we originally saw; when asked the second question we could not see beyond our original label to count the circles. This is similar to when colleagues label patients as “drug seeking”, a pain, or a “ringer”. It causes us to sometimes not be able to see past the label to the patient, intentionally or not. As we transform to leaders we need to break these biases down so patients can be seen at face value.
