“To cure sometimes, to relieve often, to comfort always.”
This quote, often attributed to Hippocrates, perfectly summarizes the mission statement of physicians worldwide. You strive, everyday, to cure ailments and relieve your patients’ symptoms, but success in these areas often depends on factors beyond your control. Relieving anxiety through patient comfort measures, on the other hand, is always within your power.
Unfortunately, in an effort to treat patients efficiently, and free up bed space, patient comfort sometimes falls to the wayside. Although you may have every intention of providing your patients with a comfortable experience, your ultimate goal is likely to treat as many people as possible within each shift.
While implementing additional patient care methods to your work as a doctor seems counterproductive to your goal of treating as many people as possible, there are plenty of methods to ensure patient comfort without adding to care time or impacting efficiency. Here are our top three suggestions:
As a child life specialist, when you’re called to a patient’s room, you never know what awaits on the other side of the door. In some cases, your services are needed to help calm the nerves of a toddler before she receives a vaccine. In other cases, you may walk in to find a hysterical child and his equally terrified parents. Sometimes you can bring a situation under control in a matter of minutes, but some take much, much longer.
For private practice office managers, hiring and recruiting is a time-consuming, expensive and, quite frankly, frustrating endeavor. From finding the right talent, to ensuring new hires are properly trained, getting the right employees in place requires a great deal of business resources. Not to mention, it’s pricey. It costs 20 percent of a worker’s $50,000 salary to replace them, according to the 
