Popular Hospital Patient Experience Book Club Builds Empathy and Staff Connections with Dr. Katherine Hockman and Dilshad Marolia NYU Langone Health

Dr. Katherine Hockman, Director of the Division of Hospital Medicine at NYU Langone Health, and Dilshad Marolia, System Director of Hospitals and Regulatory and Policy Management at NYU Langone Health, are co-leaders of the Patient Experience Book Club for the hospital employees.  Operating since 2012, the program has grown from six books to 12 books per year, with sessions offered in-person and virtually to reach across the entire health system and, in addition, hosts pop-up sessions with visiting authors. The club helps break down departmental silos within the hospital, fostering connections among employees by creating a safe space for intellectual and emotional engagement while helping to combat workplace burnout.

Katherine explains, "So my feeling is the Patient Experience Book Club is so much more than just a club where we read books and talk about them. It's really become a community of individuals who get together and share their experience in caring for some of our sickest patients. And it's also become a great venue for the faculty and staff to get to know each other a lot better and to share some of their vulnerabilities. And Dilshad and I, we've really taken it in many, many different directions. So we started off just reading six books a year, and now we're doing 12 books a year and two sessions a month, one in person and one on video for people who are in all parts of our system who can't make it in person."  

Dilshad elaborates, "But now also as a community of 53,000 people in our own health system and part of the wider community of New York City and New York State even, how do we view our communities and ourselves, and what books are transforming us, and what are we taking away from each experience? And the level of intellectual engagement is one thing, but there's a high, high level of emotional engagement that I think is rare to find in the workplace to create these safe spaces where you have a vehicle, and I'll use that word, through which you can have a discussion about a very pointed topic beyond, say, an academic journal."

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