Takeaway
Taking care of children means giving family-centered care, where we nurture a partnership between the family, patient, and healthcare team.
Passion in the Medical Profession | August 20, 2018 | 1 min read
By Richard Redett, MD, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
My philosophy about patient care is more than a viewpoint—it is a commitment to delivering compassionate, state of the art, efficient, and safe care of exceptional quality.
The mission statement we developed for our cleft and craniofacial center includes:
“Helping children be all that they can be without being limited or defined by a facial difference.”
Taking care of children always involves family-centered care where we nurture a partnership between the family, patient, and healthcare team.
I stress team as part of our clinical mission as most of the children I care for have complex, lifelong problems, which require the input of a multidisciplinary team of surgeons, nurses, dentists, orthodontists, geneticists, speech pathologists and others to best meet the needs of each child. Many of my patients have conditions which require staged reconstructive surgery over their entire childhood which allows our team to develop close relationships with the patients and their families. This permits us to give patients and their families the opportunity to make choices about many aspects of their care. It also helps build confidence in the team, making it easier for parents to trust us when we take their child to surgery.
With a large international patient population, I am also always cognizant of a patient’s cultural traditions, personal preferences, values, family situations, and lifestyles.