As a clinician, your therapeutic presence can play a pivotal role in making an Integrative Health visit successful.  Therapeutic presence is how a clinician offers care.  This overview summarizes 10 ways for a clinician to enhance their presence during patient care.  

Key Points:

• Through your therapeutic presence, you can bring integrative, whole-person care more fully into all your encounters with patients and colleagues, even when your time is limited, and no matter what type of clinician you are.
• There are many ways to be more present.  Some examples include: fostering engagement, listening well, bringing more empathy and compassion, honoring differences in perspectives, and not letting time constraints interfere with what you can do.

Introduction

What you, as a unique individual, bring into your care of patients makes an important difference, above and beyond the medications or tests you order, the procedures you do, or the referrals you make.

We all know clinicians who seem to be especially gifted when it comes to taking care of others.  Their patients love them and have especially good outcomes.  These clinicians are engaged in their work and seem to really enjoy it.  When it comes to the art of healing, they are Michelangelo.

We also know colleagues who struggle to do well by their patients.  Their patient satisfaction scores may be lower.  They may not feel like they are making as much of a difference in their patients’ lives.  They may find their work unenjoyable.  They are at high risk for burnout.  Not necessarily through any fault of their own, they may be in survival mode; for them, the art of healing may seem like an unreachable ideal.