Dr. Rana Awdish is one of Detroit’s most remarkable medical voices, helping redefine what compassionate care looks like at Henry Ford Health and beyond. After surviving a near-fatal medical crisis that took the life of her unborn child, she returned to medicine determined to change how doctors connect with patients and families. Now a physician leader, author of the bestselling memoir In Shock, and national voice on empathy in healthcare, she is helping shape a culture where healing means more than clinical outcomes. In this episode, she shares with Bob Riney how her experiences are helping transform the way clinicians interact with and provide care for patients.
Dr. Rana Awdish is one of Detroit’s most remarkable medical voices, helping redefine what compassionate care looks like at Henry Ford Health and beyond. After surviving a near-fatal medical crisis that took the life of her unborn child, she returned to medicine determined to change how doctors connect with patients and families. Now a physician leader, author of the bestselling memoir In Shock, and national voice on empathy in healthcare, she is helping shape a culture where healing means more than clinical outcomes. In this episode, she shares with Bob Riney how her experiences are helping transform the way clinicians interact with and provide care for patients.
Time Stamps
Dr. Rana Awdish's Journey and Impact on Healthcare
:15- Bob introduces Dr. Rana Awdish, highlighting her roles, achievements, and upcoming book "Aftershock."
1:56- Dr. Awdish shares her critical illness experience during her fellowship, which led her to focus on emotional and psychological aspects of patient care.
3:08- Bob and Dr. Awdish discuss the importance of teaching communication skills in medicine, beyond just medical knowledge.
3:42- Dr. Awdish emphasizes the need for physicians to be fully human and emotionally connected to their patients, which was previously discouraged.
Challenges and Receptivity in Advocating for Change
4:18- Dr. Awdish talks about the common critique that her advocacy takes too much time, which she refutes by showing that it actually increases efficiency.
4:48- Bob inquires about the reaction of Henry Ford Health to Dr. Awdish's reflections on the organization in her first book.
5:42- Dr. Awdish recounts the advice from her attorney and the decision to stand by her unedited work, which led to a positive response from the organization.
6:39- Bob expresses pride in Henry Ford Health's willingness to embrace change for the betterment of patients and communities.
Blending Work and Life Post-Trauma
7:03- Bob observes that Dr. Awdish has found a synergistic balance between work and life, which she attributes to her gratitude for recovery.
7:22- Dr. Awdish shares a memory of driving back to work after her illness, feeling grateful for the opportunity to care for patients and maintain a sense of gratitude.
8:19- Bob and Dr. Awdish discuss the importance of communication in the relationship between providers and patients, which can significantly impact outcomes.
8:40- Dr. Awdish provides examples of how rephrasing medical communication can redistribute power and respect to patients and their families.
Evolution of Medical Education and Nurse-Physician Partnership
9:26- Bob asks about the progress of medical schools in providing contemporary learning experiences that align with Dr. Awdish's teachings.
9:38- Dr. Awdish notes that medical schools are improving, with more intentional team-based training and selection of students with high emotional intelligence.
10:00- Bob inquires about the evolving role of nurses in partnership with physicians, which Dr. Awdish praises for their whole-person care approach.
10:12- Dr. Awdish highlights the importance of nurses in providing comprehensive care and integrating various inputs into the medical care plan.
Upcoming Book "Aftershock" and Personal Healing
11:28- Dr. Awdish discusses her motivation for writing "Aftershock," which focuses on the emotional and psychological aspects of healing beyond medical care.
11:41- She reflects on her initial reliance on medicine for healing and the importance of taking responsibility for emotional healing and recovery.
12:06- Dr. Awdish hopes that the book will inspire patients and doctors to recognize the body's healing potential and the importance of stories in the healing process.
12:50- Bob expresses gratitude for Dr. Awdish's impact on medicine and her role in evolving healthcare practices at Henry Ford Health.
Dr. Rana Awdish 00:00
If you have a vision you can articulate that will change health care for the better, this is the place to work, because we will embrace it.
Bob Riney 00:09
Welcome back to The BOBcast. I'm your host. Bob Riney, President, CEO of Henry Ford Health, and today's conversation goes straight to the heart of health care. I am honored to be joined by Dr. Rana Awdish, an extraordinary physician, best-selling author of landmark medical memoir "In Shock" and one of the most important voices in medicine when it comes to compassion, culture and the human experience of care. Rana serves as our medical director of care experience at Henry Ford Health. She leads our pulmonary hypertension center for comprehensive care. She is triple board certified in internal medicine, pulmonary and critical care, a clinical professor at both Michigan State University and Wayne State University. She's also been nationally recognized for her leadership, including being named a US News and World Report "Healthcare Hero" during the covid 19 pandemic. Through her work, Rana challenges all of us, from administrators to clinicians, to rethink what healing truly means, not just clinically, but emotionally and culturally. Her upcoming book "Aftershock" continues that exploration in a deeply honest and powerful way. She is literally one of the people I admire the most, a true game changer in health care, and someone who has taught me personally so much. Rana, welcome to The BOBcast.
Dr. Rana Awdish 01:36
Thank you so much.
Bob Riney 01:39
You had quite a serious illness at the end of your fellowship training that in many ways, changed your career trajectory, probably your life trajectory. Could you lay that foundation for listeners who may not know?
Dr. Rana Awdish 01:52
I'd be happy to. Literally at the end of my pulmonary and critical care fellowship, I became a critically ill patient. I had a tumor in my liver that ruptured, and it was an arterial bleed, so I effectively lost all of my blood volume into my abdomen in a matter of an hour. I was seven months pregnant at the time that bleeding compromised the baby, and we lost the pregnancy, and I found myself really in my own hospital, in multi system organ failure, in shock, and getting to see medicine from an entirely different perspective. There was a real difficulty I saw in my care teams knowing how to manage some of the non-medical aspects of my healing, the emotional trauma, the psychological burden of loss and suffering. And I really felt from that moment, if I did get well enough to come back, that was the space I wanted to work in.
Bob Riney 03:08
Prior to this incident, did you see yourself as a teacher, but maybe a teacher in a different way, or was it this experience that solidified the need for you to teach?
Dr. Rana Awdish 03:20
I think before this, I just thought I would be teaching ventilator asynchrony and hemodynamic management and pressors, and I didn't as much value the space of teaching communication. And what I found with my own experience is that one without the other is completely incomplete. You can't teach medical students and residents and fellows how to manage patients as if they're bodies and not full people.
Bob Riney 03:49
So interesting aspect of medicine historically was there was actually a belief that you had to, to a certain extent, keep yourself distant from the patient's story, because it could be too emotionally draining, and take you away from the objective kind of dispassionate look at what their clinical needs are. And you've sort of shattered that belief.
Dr. Rana Awdish 04:18
You know, in fairness, that belief, I think, came at a time when physicians weren't allowed to be fully human. They had to compartmentalize. They didn't have the kind of resources that we have now we have safe spaces for our own decompression. Now we have communities that allows us to go more fully into the lives of our patients and families and not be depleted by it.
Bob Riney 04:48
Tell me a little bit about the receptivity that you've experienced as you've gone on this journey of sharing your experience and educating others. What about people that came in with a critical view?
Dr. Rana Awdish 05:04
The biggest critique I think I get, of the work is everything you're advocating for takes so much time. If we have to listen to people, oh my goodness, I'll never get my notes done. And that's been really easy to disprove, thankfully, because that kind of efficiency just solves itself.
Bob Riney 05:22
When you first started this journey, especially in writing your first book, there was some reflections on imperfections within Henry Ford Health itself, because that's where you got care. Were you worried about the reaction of your employer, and how did it go?
Dr. Rana Awdish 05:42
So I live with an attorney. The first clue I had was when he sat me down after reading it and said, I need you to expect to get fired. Wow, and we had to sit with that and talk about it and the impact it would have on our family and decide to still go forward, and I made the really hard choice not to offer it up for editing before it was bound, because I didn't want it to be changed in a way that was untrue. I just had to stand behind it, and what I learned about us is that we own our identity as a learning organization. Every single thing that I saw in my care happens everywhere, but we were brave enough to say, it's not just us, you guys, and we're going to lead the charge on making the change at a national level.
Bob Riney 06:39
I really hear your answer with great pride, because I do think that Henry Ford Health is unafraid to go there, if it's for the betterment of patients, the betterment of our communities.
Dr. Rana Awdish 06:55
If you have a vision you can articulate that will change healthcare for the better, this is the place to work, because we will embrace it.
Bob Riney 07:03
My observation is that you found a way to blend work life balance so that they're not compartmentalized or separate, but they're synergistic with each other. Is that a fair observation, and was that the case prior to your trauma, or did that come after?
Dr. Rana Awdish 07:22
So what your question brings up for me is a memory of the first time I was driving back to work after I was so sick. It had taken me six months to recover all the learning to walk and talk again. I had to come off all of the narcotics to manage the pain, and I was driving to work, and I was filled with such a sense of gratitude that I was healthy enough to drive to work and that I was going to get to take care of patients, and then I was going to get to come home, and like I had recovered my life, and I really intentionally hung on to that sense of gratitude. It isn't lost on me that we need our bodies to be able to do the work that we want to do. We need our bodies to be healthy and to have that gratitude at the center just makes everything feel like a gift.
Bob Riney 08:19
Communication is a theme that you talk about in weave into every single conversation as probably the biggest determinant of a relationship between a provider and a patient, and then a pathway for good outcomes. So tell us a little bit about your learnings on communication.
Dr. Rana Awdish 08:41
We get to hear from patients about what went wrong, and more often than anything, the medical care goes perfectly, and there's some miscommunication that really nestles in them and hurts. And we get to take those learnings and put them into our courses. When a physician says your mom needs to be intubated. That takes power away from the family. What we propose as an alternative is your mom's breathing is getting worse. Can we talk about what that might mean and what we can do from here?
Bob Riney 09:16
Big difference.
Dr. Rana Awdish 09:18
It is and it just redistributes power to them. It says who she is. Her story matters.
Bob Riney 09:26
Where do you think medical schools are on their journey of having a contemporary learning experience that matches what your experiences has told us is the need?
Dr. Rana Awdish 09:38
They're doing so much better than when I was in medical school. There is intentional team based training on communication. They are even selecting students that fit with a high EI phenotype. They are thinking about this upstream. Our job now is not to break them when they get into health care.
Bob Riney 10:00
I want to ask you about the partnership between physicians and nurses. Tell me a little bit about the evolution of the role of the nurse in partnership with everything you're describing.
Dr. Rana Awdish 10:12
Nurses have my whole heart. When I think about my learning about how to communicate. The best examples come from nurses, because they have a much more whole person view of how to care for a patient and their family.
Bob Riney 10:30
They're spending a lot more time.
Dr. Rana Awdish 10:31
They are in the room. They're hearing the side conversations. They're hearing the questions. They know what the patient and families don't ask us. They are the center of care. And when I round, when I see patients, I think of myself more as just a hub that receives information from the people around me, the respiratory therapists, the nurses, the social workers, and helps to integrate it into the medical care plan without receiving all of those inputs, the care is incomplete and nurses are right there at the top.
Bob Riney 11:12
You have a new book coming out "After Shock," and it's coming out in June. Tell us about when you decided it was time for writing another book, and what you hope the message will be from this one.
Dr. Rana Awdish 11:27
My learning has grown and changed over time, and I really found that I needed to move the conversation forward. What I learned about myself in the process of writing, it was I had ceded my healing to medicine. I esteemed medicine so much that I just figured, however healthy medicine can get me, that's how healthy I'm going to get. And I didn't take responsibility for the emotional healing or recovering from the PTSD, or really even learning not to view my body as a ticking time bomb. What I hope that patients will take away from this next book and doctors too, is that the body knows so much more than we give it credit for. It is a partner in healing. Our stories are a part of our healing if we tap into it and don't disregard it, the healing potential is limitless.
Bob Riney 12:27
Rana, it's been just a joy to have you on The BOBcast, and more importantly, I can't thank you enough for the role that you are playing to change the trajectory of medicine. You bring joy to me, and I am so grateful that you are such a key part of Team Henry Ford Health.
Dr. Rana Awdish 12:45
Thank you.
Bob Riney 12:46
The real deal is a phrase that can be often misunderstood or misused, but Rana is the real deal. I mean, she has taken all of her life experiences and channeled them into making a positive difference, and she does so with ease. She does so with non-judgment. She does so with passion, and she does so with conviction. Her role in evolving medicine cannot be overstated. She is a person of impact, and I hope you enjoyed listening to her as much as I enjoyed talking to her. If you enjoyed this episode, please click follow so you will never miss a future episode. Share us with your friends and leave us a five star rating and review, which will help others find us. If you have suggestions for a topic or a guest, email us at bobcast@hfhs.org, remember, every action we take today is a step towards the future we're building together. Let's keep striving, keep believing and keep moving forward. Let's use positive momentum to carry us through an era that's filled with troubling questions. Until next time, take care and keep making a difference.