Tag Archives: Pecha Kucha: A Special Families and Health Blog Series

This is is part of the Pecha Kucha: A Special Families and Health Blog Series.

What can you learn in 6 minutes and 40 seconds? Is this enough time to deeply listen to the person in front of you? Can you walk away with a new idea, a challenging proposition, motivation to learn more? We think so! Pecha Kucha is a structured approach to presentations that allows 20 images with 20 seconds of talk time for a presenter to use to communicate with an audience. Pecha Kucha gives us just shy of 7 minutes to engage and learn something new.

Colleen Fogarty, MD, MSc

I am delighted to introduce a series of blog posts co-hosted (and co-posted!) by the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine (STFM) and the Collaborative Family Healthcare Association (CFHA).  Both organizations are near and dear to my heart. STFM, founded in 1967, boasts a tagline of “Transforming health care through education” and as a professional home for family medicine faculty from multiple many disciplines, achieves that mission daily. (http://www.stfm.org/About) CFHA, founded in 1995, “promotes comprehensive and cost-effective models of healthcare delivery that integrate mind and body, individual and family, patients, providers, and communities.” (https://www.cfha.net/page/MissionStatement)

This series of blogs is based on a seminar presented at the 2018 STFM conference, in which the presenters, Randall Reitz, PhD, LMFT, Amy M. Romain, LMSW, ACSW, Valerie Ross MS, LMFT, and Daniel S. Felix, PhD, LMFT used the Pecha Kucha format to provide an engaging, visually stimulating overview of important concepts from family systems theory.

Understanding the concept of shared family beliefs allows a physician to recognize when a certain lifestyle change might be easier or harder for the patient sitting in front of them.  

Family physicians we should make a clear stand for the importance of family systems approaches. Otherwise, we are glorified (or un-glorified) internists who sometimes deliver babies and see kids!   

Posts in this series:

• Creating a Culture of Family-Centeredness
• Family Beliefs
• Family-Centered Integrated Care
• The Doctor-Patient-Family Triangle: Training Residents to Work With Triangulation in the Clinic Encounter

This is is part of the Pecha Kucha: A Special Families and Health Blog Series.

Valerie Ross, MS, LMFT

At age 9 I took up the cello. It has been one of the joys of my life and surprisingly an important influence in my approach to teaching physicians.

To learn to play an instrument, you perform in front of a teacher who uses everything they know to coach you to play proficiently and musically. They first listen, they demonstrate and teach specific skills like how to hold the instrument or draw the bow, asking questions and offering encouragement. Then you go home and practice and come back for more coaching.

Imagine for a moment if we taught musicians the way we teach most health care clinicians. A learner would rarely play their instrument in front of their teacher. They’d describe their perception of their playing. We’d learn how they think about playing their instrument but not how they actually play. It does not make sense to us to think about training musicians or athletes without observation and coaching, and yet this is the way many health care providers are taught. We need to define, hear, see, and model the concepts and skills we want our learners to practice.

As a family therapist and behavioral scientist in a family medicine residency, I regularly observe residents in clinical encounters; in this context I find opportunities to teach them about the family systems concept called triangulation.  

Two founding fathers of a family-oriented primary care approach, Bill Doherty, PhD, and Mac Baird, MD, observed that the doctor-patient relationship is always a triangle involving the clinician, the patient, and the family.

A clinician can use her or his position in the triangle therapeutically. However, if we are unaware of this triangle, we neglect to think about family members who are not in the room and we risk the possibility of unconscious “triangulation.”

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