By Jennifer Larson, NurseZone contributor
Sheila Brune, RN, BS, used to read the morning newspaper to pore over the obituaries. Buried within the section were the stories of some of her former patients she once cared for in the hospital.
Justin Neally, a volunteer at Memorial Hospital in Carthage, Illinois, interviews a patient for the "Living History" program.
“I always looked forward to reading their obituary because I knew I was going to find out something about them that I didn’t know before,” she said.
As her eyes widened over the details of a patient’s distinguished career or another patient’s illustrious family, she thought, “Why do I have to wait for them to die to get that information?”
That was in 2000. And thus was born the “Living History” program at Great River Medical Center in West Burlington, Iowa.
Brune conferred with the hospital’s social work staff to discuss setting up a program that would allow patients to tell their stories. Not only would it make the patients feel good to talk about themselves and their lives, it would give the nurses and other hospital staffers insight into their lives and their psyches.
“People want to be valued and you can’t value someone unless you know something about them,” said Brune. “I think our patients want to be listened to. I think they want us to discover their uniqueness ... and treat them in a unique way.”
From then on, every patient chosen to participate in the program received the chance to be interviewed about his or her life story. The interviews were typed up in a one-page short-story format and attached to the very front of the patients’ medical charts. But the patients also received a special laminated copy on cardstock to keep for their very own.
And the stories began pouring out of people.
Brune remembers popping into one patient’s room just to visit him, when the man, who was in his 90s, began to rattle off the dates of his first job and when he met his wife. “He was just amazing,” she said. “I grabbed a paper towel and was writing as fast as I could.”
She typed up a rough draft of his story and gave him a copy to proofread. The next day, she spotted him reading it and enjoying the trip down memory lane.
“It was a precious moment,” she said.
Another elderly patient hesitated at first when Brune assigned a young man to interview her for her own “Living History” story. She told him she didn’t have much of a story, but then she went on to regale him with colorful tales of her life in a small northeastern town. Almost as an afterthought, she told him that she named two cats she received one summer after Mark Twain—because she knew the famous humorist and author when she was a little girl. Brune is still amused that the woman tried to say she didn’t have a story to tell.
Brune eventually turned over the reins of the program at Great River Medical Center, which has now logged more than 4,000 “Living History” stories. She left to take a position at Memorial Hospital in Carthage, Illinois, where she launched a second “Living History” program. She now has signed agreements with about a dozen hospitals that now operate a “Living History” program, including Yale-New Haven Hospital in Connecticut.
She assigns high school and college students to interview patients and write up their stories, while she oversees the program and helps choose patients to participate. Typically, she chooses patients with chronic illnesses or conditions that require longer or more frequent stays in the hospital, and she tries to ensure that all nursing home and hospice patients receive the chance to tell their stories, too.
Each completed story gives the patient’s nurses and doctors a chance to learn about the details of the patient’s life that don’t make it into the brief social history included in the average medical chart. That allows them to make connections with the patient, to get to know them better and to show them that their lives and needs are important.
“You can catch what their passion is, and you can capture that in a story,” Brune said.
Brune believes that having a “Living History” program in place can help a hospital improve patients’ perceptions of its customer service. A facility may already provide excellent patient care, but the program can boost the “wow factor” that appeals to people.
For more information on starting a program, visit Living History Program.
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