Tricia Pil
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Pittsburgh, PA
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In 2005, I was a pediatrician happily ensconced in suburban private practice. I was also a wife and mother of two young children, with a third on the way. On October 1, 2005, with the delivery of my son, my world came crashing down. A series of medical errors occurred that nearly killed us both. Even worse was the response I got from the hospital and medical community as I searched for answers to what happened, how, and why. I experienced firsthand the wall of silence, the denial, and the refusal of an apology from my physicians, many of whom I had trained with and under during my residency. I felt abandoned and betrayed by my own colleagues and struggled with feelings of disbelief, anger, and shame. My faith was shattered-everything I thought I knew and believed about medicine, this profession to which I had devoted a lifetime of training and practice, my very identity as a physician-was destroyed.
It was an event that forever changed me, opening my eyes to a darker side of medicine that beforehand I barely knew existed. Following my experience, I resolved to do everything I could as a pediatrician and a mother to ensure that what happened to me would never again happen to another patient.
I wrote a personal narrative and submitted it for publication to a major academic medical journal. It was rejected. I tried again. And again. And again. And again. In April 2010, after nearly two years' worth of serial rejection letters, I published my story, "Babel: The Voices of a Medical Trauma," in the online medical journal Pulse. Within three days, "Babel" broke the record for number of viewer hits and reader comments in the journal's history. In the summer of 2011, my story was adapted to video and in October 2012 was published in the anthology "Pulse:More Voices." Both my story and video are freely available online and on YouTube and are incorporated into the syllabi of several medical ethics and law school programs across the country.
In 2010, I was one of 50 patient activists selected nationwide to attend a Leadership Summit hosted by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) and the Cautious Patient Foundation. It was at this summit that I met fellow advocate Regina Holliday, who connected me to SpeakerLink. I am a founding chapter leader in the IHI Open School program which teaches patient safety and quality improvement skills to health care professionals and have blogged about issues of maternal and pediatric patient safety for Science and Sensibility, Lamaze International's blog on healthy, compassionate, and evidence-based maternity care. In collaboration with professional root cause analyst (RCA) Robert Latino, CEO of Reliability, Inc. and patient safety advocates, I have produced patient and family-engaged RCA presentations of health care sentinel events. I serve on the board of directors of the Pittsburgh Consumer Health Coalition, a grassroots nonprofit healthcare advocacy organization that works to improve universal access to quality health care.
I am currently the medical director for quality and safety at Children's Community Pediatrics, the largest pediatric and adolescent primary care practice network in southwestern Pennsylvania, and a practicing board-certified pediatrician. I also have a Six Sigma green belt from the American Society for Quality and am currently working toward black belt certification.
Looking back, I sometimes feel that my experience was the best thing that ever happened to me. I was given a second chance at life and, in the process, found my true calling as a physician-to be a true advocate and healing presence for patients and families affected by medical error and a passionate proponent for change in our health care system.
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My story is outlined above, and the link to my published narrative In Pulse: Voices from the Heart of Medicine and the film adaptation is freely available at: http://pulsemagazine.org/Archive_Index.cfm?content_id=119
Thank you!
Tricia
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