The Power of Our Words: Cultivating Word Choice in Patient-Centered Care

The Power of Our Words:

Cultivating Word Choice in

Patient-Centered Care

Presenter:  Terry Altilio, LCSW

Objectives:

1. Review common language used healthcare settings to raise consciousness about the influence of word choice on patients, families and outcomes. 

2. Provide examples of words and phrases commonly used in both outpatient and inpatients settings such as ICU, hospice and oncology which have unintended clinical consequences.

3. Share alternative phrasings and interventions to enhance word choice of self and colleagues to improve patient- centered care.

4. Reinforce social workers and nurses as experts in communication, with a consequent responsibility to empower and become leaders in fostering change around word choice and language. 

Terry Altilio LCSW is a national social work expert on pain.  She is a palliative social work consultant with over two decades of experience working with patients and families in hospital settings. She lectures in post masters social work programs at New York University, Smith and California State University San Marcos. She is a recipient of a Project on Death in America Career Achievement Award and a Social Work Leadership Award which supported a palliative social work fellowship and listserv which currently links 750 social workers. She has received a Mayday Pain and Society Fellowship Award and a Social Worker of the Year award from the Association of Oncology Social Work.  She has co-authored publications, lectured nationally and internationally and is co-editor with Shirley Otis-Green of the Oxford Textbook of Palliative Social Work and most recently co-editor with Bridget Sumser and Meaghan Lyon Leimena of Palliative Care – A Guide for Health Social Workers published in January 2019.

Co-Sponsors: The UIHC Care Coordination Division, The Aging and Longevity Studies Program, and the School of Social Work. 

Please contact  mercedes-bern-klug@uiowa.edu if you have questions about the speaker.  Contact Rachel Asbury if you have questions about the setting and CEUs: rachel-asbury@uiowa.edu