On National Pediatrician Day, Abhay Dandekar shares why it’s important to build trust with patients.
Recently, I have been thinking a lot about trust and why it’s become so elusive. Trust is the reason I became a pediatrician. Parents trust us because of our expertise to help with babies and spirited toddlers, scrapes and bumps, seasonal and chronic illnesses and the routine (or not so routine) teenage years.
Modern pediatric medical care has dropped childhood mortality by almost 95 percent over the past 100 years! But disinformation and impatience have been chipping away, sometimes making the exam room feel less like a sanctuary for discussion and more like a pressurized checkout lane. I have to sometimes remind everyone, myself included, that our patients are not apps. While a predictive chatbot might say that cough has a 17 percent chance of being a bacterial illness, it takes the wisdom of a pediatrician to translate with humility and steer safely.
This month, a hesitant parent said she wanted my opinion about vaccines because she trusts me. I presented our unchanged pediatric society recommendations guided by science and safety. I wondered if her trust in me alone was going to convince her. She said she’d think about it. When I asked her if she still trusted me, she smiled and firmly said yes.
It reminded me that trust isn’t transactional and can’t just be assumed as the proxy of a wanted outcome. I realize that one secret to longevity as a pediatrician is more listening than doing, more learning than operating and more understanding than dismissing – all foundational for multidirectional trust.