National Healthcare Quality Week: Listening to Patients to Improve Care Delivery With Lauren Ghazal, PhD, FNP-BC, and Matthew Hadfield, DO
Expert Perspectives · Keira Smith · 2024-10-22
What is National Healthcare Quality Week?
National Healthcare Quality Week, held from October 20-26, 2024, is a time to honor healthcare professionals for their commitment towards ensuring quality service delivery and to raise awareness of efforts underway to improve the safety of both patients and clinicians. In this interview, Dr. Lauren Ghazal, Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing at the University of Rochester Medical Center, and Dr. Matthew Hadfield, Medical Oncologist at Brown University, share their perspectives on ensuring healthcare quality, including:
- Statistics on preventable errors in the healthcare system
- The link between healthcare cost and quality
- Initiatives at their respective institutions, the University of Rochester and Brown University, to partner across disciplines and ensure optimal care delivery
- Novel quality and safety metrics that have been developed as immunotherapies are incorporated into practice
- The role of patient-reported outcomes and symptom reporting in predicting and managing immune-related toxicities
- How listening to patients and their concerns helps to improve care delivery
- And more!
The Key to Improving Healthcare Quality
“When we listen to patients, better decisions get made. We all struggle with the metrics, the biases, whether we’re measuring the right things, whether we’re making improvements where we should be. But if you just listen to patients, nine times out of 10, things go better. If someone says they’re not ready to be discharged from the hospital, there’s probably a reason. Anecdotally, any time I have listened to a patient and taken their concerns seriously, it’s always a better outcome for everyone.” – Matthew Hadfield, DO
About Dr. Ghazal and Dr. Hadfield
Lauren Ghazal, PhD, FNP-BC, is an Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing and an Associate Member in Cancer Prevention and Control at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York. Her research focuses on nursing work-related challenges and financial toxicity experienced by adolescent and young adult cancer survivors, incorporating economic, clinical, and personal experiences to address survivorship disparities.
Matthew Hadfield, DO, is a Medical Oncologist at Brown University/Legorreta Cancer Center, with a pending faculty appointment at the Warren Alpert School of Medicine of Brown University. He recently completed his Hematology/Oncology Fellowship at Brown University. Dr. Hadfield’s clinical and research interests are in phase 1 clinical trials and developmental therapeutics, as well as cutaneous malignancies and immunotherapy-related adverse events.