Hello, my name is Eric Harp and thank you for listening to my brief presentation over our study looking at the social history and some of the challenges with which it is associated. As a medical educator at osteopathic school, we are continually looking to improve our ability to recognize some of the challenges and address some of the challenges in gathering a social history. Social history in my experience, both clinically and as an educator, is one of the areas of the patient interview that there is a lot of differences of opinion with regards to its nature and how it's carried out and certainly recognizing the different challenges therein with the social history. So what I looked to get at was having three different groups give me different perspectives on what some of the challenges, what aspects are, particularly looking at the social history as an opportunity to convey empathy, which is what we're always trying to keep at the forefront of our patient interviews and be able to recognize that we are keeping the patient first in our forefront and being sensitive to their needs as we are gathering information as part of a systematic way to gather information to help best help those patients in those particular situations. So looking at three different groups had a patient representing group with non-clinical associated staff here on campus as well as a group of PA students and DO students really looking at is the social history coming from the perspective of the social history has such an opportunity to represent both empathy as well as the osteopathic triune nature of looking at health and wellness, having a bodily, emotional, and spiritual component. So looking at different aspects of that and comparing with the three groups, most people agreed that the social history does afford an opportunity to address both the osteopathic perspective as well as empathy. No consensus about what the largest challenges or what some of the biggest barriers or challenges to taking a social history and looking into the social history was identified. One surprising finding was that the students found that asking about spiritual and emotional health was the most difficult part of taking a social history so this offers an interesting opportunity to identify ways that we can continue to improve our ability to make students most readily and most comfortable in taking this part of the patient interview. No significant differences on the perspectives about social history, its relationship to empathy and osteopathic principles were identified, however, one area of note limited by the small sample size but certainly peculiar was that the group of DO students actually found that the social history was least representative of the osteopathic principle of mind, body, and spirit proposing the question about how are we best conveying the osteopathic spirit and tradition into all aspects of our medical educational program, certainly a consideration. Finding supported the importance of having a social history and being a part of a complete patient visit and recognizing that it does support building trust in the relationship and that it is in fact essential to health and wellness, recognizing that some aspects of the social history particularly asking about spiritual and emotional health are some of the more challenging areas of questioning when it regards to the patient interview in taking the social history. Thank you for listening to my presentation of our interesting study that we conducted here and I appreciate your time.

social history

osteopathic principles

empathy

medical education

holistic care