SOCIAL GOOD
Improving Patient-Provider Communication
Emily Magee
Ethical reflection and responsibility, awareness and obligations to the common good, and democratic decision-making can bring redress to stubborn problems of society. A social good is often defined as something that benefits the largest number of people in the greatest possible way, such as clean water, affordable healthcare, or universal education. But it may also refer to sustained social responsibility, as in the promotion of practices that are better for urban and rural living or the environment. Sometimes this responsibility is rooted in a moral theory of the good. The political philosopher John Rawls wrote explicitly about "certain general conditions" that ought to be "equally to everyone's advantage" in his Theory of Justice (1971). Other times it is simply considered a matter of good economics or politics, as reflected in theories of neoclassical and welfare economics, social and choice, and deliberative democracy. It is important to understand the potential for good (and harm) in responding to social, ecological, political, and other challenges.
At some point in time, most people have visited a doctor. This might have been because they were sick, injured, or just for a simple check up. Patient-provider communication is so important between the patient and doctor. The interaction between a patient and healthcare provider can make the difference of if they get better or not. In some research articles, the authors are saying that provider communication needs to be improved. There are a few improvements that need to be made in patient-provider interactions to provide better communication.
Different patients have different needs when communicating with their provider. This article examines how every patient should conduct an assessment to help define their health literacy, cultural, behavior, and physical barriers. This would help the provider be able to carry out the conversation better with the patient and get their needs taken care of. Communication between the patient and provider can be what saves their life. Patients who are communication impaired have poorer health outcomes. Critically ill or non-speaking patients have to use nonverbal behaviors and this can be difficult for them to communicate to their providers. Providers need to be able to take care of everyone, so having effective communication is very important to the patient's health outcomes.
Providers need to be trained on effective communication skills during patient interactions. Communication strategies have been ignored in medical schools. This would be the first step in creating better communication strategies between the patient and provider. If providers learn these strategies early on, they will be more educated on how important it is to have effective communication with patients. Healthcare providers should also be trained on when to include communication specialists in their interactions. An example of a communication specialist used in the healthcare field is a speech language pathologist. Having the knowledge of when to obtain a communication specialist for a patient can not only help the provider, but help the patient communicate with the provider as well.
In conclusion, providers need to be made more aware of communication strategies for their patients. Improving communication between the patient and provider enhances the safety of the patient and improves the patient’s health outcomes. Some of the different methods used to enhance patient-provider communication include making an extra effort to build trust, listen without interrupting, make special efforts to meet the individual's needs, and follow up. Doing these simple methods as a provider can provide a better outcome to their patients. Communication is a basic skill but can really make the difference between a good or bad interaction. Patients today want to be able to be a part of the decision making for their treatment, so it is vital that providers can communicate with the patient to help them understand what is going on with their health.
Ethical Media
Hannah McAllister
According to educators at Gustavus Adolphus College, ethical reflection involves “the thoughtful evaluation of ethical questions and the development of a critical awareness regarding the values that inform the choices all people, including oneself, make when confronting such questions.” Nonprofit media that is created without ethical reflection or responsibility can promote harmful mentalities and attitudes such as negative stereotypes and a savior complex. Ethical reflection and responsibility within nonprofit marketing can help nonprofits become more impactful and transparent and also foster more honest representations of the populations that they serve. Nonprofit media and marketing plays a key role in ensuring ethical and compassionate treatment of people.
Unethical and irresponsible media can steal agency from those who receive aid by portraying them as passive victims. Such media can also support savior complex mentalities. For instance, this 2003 UNHCR ad portrays an Italian actress as the savior of an African family. In English the description reads: “It takes so few to become an Angel. …With only 8 Euro per month you can protect, help, and even save the lives of a family of refugees. Become an Angel of the UNHCR. ... A whole African family is waiting for this miracle.” Here Christian imagery is abused to suggest that money is what makes a donor an “angel” and a “savior.” In the process African families are stripped of their agency and dignity. They are portrayed as passively anticipating a wondrous event. No context is given about their situation. No room is allowed for the family to communicate their story. They are simply used as a symbol. They represent a harmful stereotype: the starving African family who must emotionally appeal to a Western audience.
Ethical and responsible media is characterized by empowering images that create a common humanity, promote dignity, and preserve agency. In this War Child advertisement, Batman brings joy and protection to a child in a refugee camp. But at the end of the ad it is revealed that Batman is the child’s father. This advertisement creates common humanity by showing that refugee families are similar to Western families. Refugee parents play with and protect their children just as Western parents do. It promotes dignity by challenging the savior complex. In flipping the narrative, the aid provider is not the hero: the father is. Both the father and the child are portrayed with dignity. This dignity helps preserve agency. Any parent who cares for their child as a refugee, and any child who can find the heart to play during a war, is capable of resilience and independence. They are not helpless victims.
The 20’s – The (Hopeful) Decade of Shared Value
Kelly Bradshaw
I have been fascinated by the concept of shared value and new-age corporate social responsibility since seeing Michael Porter’s Ted Talk on shared value in the summer of 2020. Shared value is defined as “pursuing financial success in a way that also yields societal benefits” (Kramer, Pfitzer, 2016). His talk was based off of the Harvard Business Review article called the "Ecosystem of Shared Value" (Kramer, Pfitzer, 2016). Instead of seeing investing in social problems as an operating downer or a branding opportunity, it views the investment in social problem solving as a way to positively strengthen affected stakeholder communities while simultaneously building competitive advantage and organizational longevity. What Kramer and Pfitzer assert is that no organization can pursue shared value alone due to industry structure and constraints that are out of a single organization’s control. The key to success is to create an almost blended coalition of government, non-profits, and private or publicly-traded organizations to combat and solve social problems.
I find pursuing shared value or the social good fascinating due to my interest in the concept of tradeoffs. I remember first learning about tradeoffs in economics and became entranced by the idea of making the “right” decision. It played into my social sciences brain and made me ponder what school of thought or philosophy breeds the purely right decision. Life would be so simple and euphoric if decisions were clear cut with no tradeoffs and no competing schools of thought. But- life would also be pretty boring. The reason I mention tradeoffs is because sometimes pursuing the social good is seen as a tradeoff and is an anti-commercial interest.
What I find promising about the concept of shared value is that an organization can adopt an attitude that pursuing the social good isn’t always just a sunk cost- but can become your competitive advantage. For example, the South African mining company Anglo American rolled out the first South African HIV-AIDS diagnostic and treatment program to protect their workforce and prevent the costs associated with HIV down the line. By investing in this program, it strengthened the health of the community where their work force lived, improving their quality of life. This individual quality of life improvement can cause a chain reaction in the workplace: improving productivity, morale, and culture. Even if the improvement and positive repercussions happen at an incremental pace, the overall community and organization will be better off in the long run.
In my own research, I have always gravitated towards organizations that employ similar attitudes to the foundation of shared value. I feel like engraining values that promote the overall social good in operations and decisions adds a layer of humanity to the collective that is a for-profit organization. That humane layer, if orchestrated authentically, can add intangible value to the customer’s experience, causing them to respect and invest in that organization. I think when organization’s see their corporate social responsibility initiatives more in a shared value light, as a way to use their authentic voice and tell their individual story, it has a higher intangible positive impact for the organization that cannot be quantified. My hope for this next decade is that we genuinely learn from the COVID-19 pandemic. It is in every organization’s interest, no matter what industry, to promote the social good or well-being. Because one day, the world might shut down again, and the mistakes continued to be made from a public and private perspective will be unfortunately, precedented.
The Healing Process
Kathryn Dealey
Meeting the Social Standards of Tomorrow's Medicine
Simon Anderson
It is no secret to pre-med students that, until relatively recently, science courses were the most important factor in determining acceptance to medical school. Disinterest in humanities-based general education courses and hyperfixation on the natural sciences damaged the way these students saw their fellow man. Humans were chemical and biological machines, full of reactions and tissues and preprogrammed neural pathways that were to be targeted by treatments and medicines. The implication of this was a degradation of empathy and understanding. Personal uniqueness fell out of view by this generation of medical students (now COVID-era doctors). Issues of racial and ethnic bias and discrimination have been flaring in part due to this insensitivity ("insensitivity" used here indicates a lack of perception, not the active detriment or disparaging of a group that the word has come to mean), including recently where coronavirus treatment is concerned. Medical professionals, especially when placed in the research lab or in terminal medical wards, have closed themselves off to their patients' struggles, lest their patients’ strife eat them up too. A minority of medical professionals simply never practiced the capacity to care for their patients beyond their records and symptoms.
Given the visibility of biases, and disregard for interpersonal difference and personalized needs, it became obvious that something had to change in how we train our medical workers. Those seeking to do something about the problem looked upstream of what some may consider the natural solution - retraining and re-sensitizing medical professionals already working in the field - to medical schools. If hospitals and research institutions could draw their new employees from pools of medical students who were already trained in understanding other humans and exhibiting empathy for their patients, the observed issues may be mitigated or disappear entirely.
However, medical schools and medical students took issue with such requests.
Each of the four years of medical school has unique characteristics that were found to make them "unsuited" for medically relevant person-focused education (referred to by the blanket term "medical humanities"). On top of medical schools already having full, difficult courseloads expected of students every year, Shapiro et al. point out that:
- the first year of medical school is "too far removed from the clinical setting" for such education to be relevant and/or useful;
- the second year is focused on preparing for exams that do not test on such things;
- the third year is focused on mastery of medical techniques; and
- the fourth year often involves students traveling away from their educational institution and its classrooms and professors.
As a result of medical schools' subtle refusal to focus on interpersonal education, the schools looked even further upstream in medical professionals' development: undergraduate studies. The clearest manifestation of this was in the 2015 update of the MCAT. This update added social science (sociology) and psychology sections to the exam. With this addition, pre-med students were handed a requirement that they have at least some person-oriented education. Interestingly, this invalidates the argument presented in Shapiro et al.'s paper as to why medical humanities could not be covered in medical schools even in the first year, as the MCAT and undergraduate education is even further from medical practice than that first year. On a related note, COVID online learning may also invalidate the argument made about the fourth year of medical school, as infrastructure for widely accessible distance learning at the college level has started being laid.
To sum up everything that has been illustrated above, the medical humanities – person-oriented coursework of medical relevance – is the product of a need for less bias, less insensitivity, and more empathy in medical practice. While oddly deflecting responsibility, undergraduate education has become the hub of interpersonal development for medical students. What's more, this education must be in a high enough quantity and of a high enough quality that it sticks with the student through the MCAT, through medical school, and into medical practice - a process that can take almost a decade. To meet the social standards of tomorrow's medicine, schools and students need to make sure that prospective medical professionals are exposed to as much high-quality sociology, psychology, anthropology, and other medically relevant humanities courses as possible.
How to Support Non-Profits
Sarah Brantley
The phrase ‘social good’ refers to a “good or service that benefits the largest number of people in the largest possible way.” (Investopedia, 2022) But what does that mean to an average individual? How would an individual respond to a person or situation in need of help? Homelessness, hunger, and many other social issues plague our society. So what can we do to help to combat these issues?
In the United States, the top one percent controls 31.1% of the wealth in the US economy while the bottom fifty percent only controls 3.2% of the shared wealth in the economy (Statista, 2022). This large economic gap illustrates financial inequalities that greatly impact the lives of average American citizens. Many struggle to make ends meet in jobs that pay minimum wage or are just slightly above the authorized federal wage. The amount of money many people take home is not sustainable and does not provide enough money for an individual to have a “decent standard of living.” (WallStreetMojo, 2022) Many people are not making enough money to cover their city’s basic living costs.
Non-profit organizations can help combat economic struggles. Some of these are community development corporations founded “to support and revitalize communities, especially those that are impoverished or struggling.” (NACEDA, 2014) Non-profits can positively impact their surrounding communities and help those who are financially struggling. They can fundamentally shift where large sums of money go and can illustrate how it can be used for “good.” According to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), (IRS exemption requirements) these organizations are “organized and operated” following “section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.” Earnings that are made from these organizations are used solely for the nonprofit. Individuals and shareholders who work for these institutions cannot make any money from their respective nonprofits.
There are many ways to support these non-profits which, in turn, will prove to be a substantial help in aiding individuals in the community. You could volunteer at an organization. For example, a local food pantry may need help to pack food bags, make deliveries, or hand out food at the pantry for those in need. You could donate unwanted clothes, shoes, and even household items to nonprofits. Another thing that we, as a society, can do for these non-profits is to donate directly to these organizations. They are funded solely on generous donations which allow them to continue their work for the community. When you choose to donate to these nonprofits, check to see if the company you work for has a matchmaking donation system in place. With this system in place, the company will match that donation amount (up to a certain amount) made by their employee and donate the funds to a nonprofit.
In 2022, donation “giving” increased by 4.1% in the last year, making this the six year of growth in a row for charitable contributions. (DoubletheDonation, 2023) A societal good addresses the needs of individuals, and these “good” deeds are making a positive impact on our society. A donation does not have to be large at all. You could simply donate blood to The Red Cross. But any contribution is needed and could fundamentally change someone’s life for the better.
Social Justice in Historic Preservation
Hope Young
I put myself in others’ shoes all the time. I spot a homeless man walking down the road and I feel the same cold chill he feels. I hear a sad song on the radio and I sense the pain behind the words. I see a mom struggling with her kids at the grocery store and I feel the frustration in her mind. Empathy is something I know personally. So when I met Penelope Jones (not her real name) this past summer and heard the struggles she has been through, I felt defeat. Not only is she suffering from injustice, but she is being wronged by the very system I am steering my studies and career towards.
In the Historic Preservation world, there are few construction workers who know how to do the job properly, or just don’t care to learn. Painters get hired for a job and cut corners, like priming work or merely running the color by the homeowner. They will take the money they are paid, and leave the job unfinished, leaving more work for the next person. Sometimes even backtracking. The same goes for flooring finishers, plumbers, and many family members. You might think family would be more understanding; they are willing to come in and listen to the work you need done. But then they jump to conclusions and take it upon themselves to remove entire bathrooms and the plaster walls. Again, this creates more work and expense for the owner. The things these workers take advantage of is a prime example of the social injustices of Historic Preservation.
Twenty years ago, Penelope bought a home erected in 1870 in on a downtown street in Virginia. She's a septuagenarian, never married, and has no kids to help her with the huge project she took on so long ago. So, when I came into her life just a couple months ago, I listened to her story. And I could empathize with her. She had hired painters to lay their brushes down on the outside window frames and pillars on the front porch, but had not selected a final color. The painters found her samples and went ahead with the job. Because they didn’t want to do the prep work, like stripping the current paint and priming the surfaces, they took advantage of this struggling woman while she was out of town. This is just one of the many examples of how workers who are supposed to help preserve historic buildings are only interested in making money, instead of doing the good work they are paid to do. Empathizing with Penelope has come naturally; her pain is something I will not easily forget.
Intersectionality, Compassion, and Empathy
Kaitlyn Gentille
The intersectionality of sociological and economic systems of oppression is difficult to discuss, and hard to address. Empathy, compassion, and being culturally competent help us understand the individuals who may experience a completely different background than ourselves. Everyone should be more aware of sociological and humanistic interests, from socioeconomic status, privilege, and diversity issues, to differing religious affiliations, ethnic upbringings, cultural backgrounds, and belief systems. All of these factors are important components that make each and every individual unique with their own story. Everyone should be a more open-minded individual.
Intersectionality examines the intersections between various systems of oppression that can lead to social stratification from a variety of related factors. We live in a hierarchical society that ranks categories of people based on race, ethnicity, power, prestige, wealth, education, healthcare access, income, gender, citizenship, affordable and sustainable living conditions, and other socioeconomic factors. This ranking leads to some individuals being privileged, while others face hardships resulting from these societal inequalities in their everyday life. The interconnectedness of structural violence, which stems from a variety of socioeconomic factors, is one example of how intersectionality affects social inequalities and privilege. The disparities that separate the “haves” from the “have nots” in a population can put individuals at a disadvantage from their very starting point in life, without any of their own decisions or choices playing a role in how fortunate they are. After doing extensive reflection and analysis on this substantive societal issue, I realize that I have a responsibility and obligation to continue diving into the various interrelated systems that enable a corrupt and unjust system to remain in place. Society and all of the parts that make up the whole work together in an interconnected fashion. There is a dynamic and connected relationship between social systems and the people who participate in them. Individuals are affected and shaped by how they participate in a system, thus no system can change by means of an individual alone.
One notable example of the role that socioeconomic status plays in a society can be analyzed by looking at the relationship socioeconomic status has with COVID-19. In America, socioeconomic status is intertwined with race and ethnicity, and people of color are “disproportionately represented among persons of lower income and less education” (Rollston). Because of this, individuals who live in impoverished communities have less access to adequate health care, leaving these populations vulnerable to a global pandemic. A study from Harvard shows that this disease is of higher risk to societies with a lower socioeconomic status. For starters, those in a lower socioeconomic location tend to have poorer living conditions due to their limited amount of income readily available and tend to have a heavier reliance towards public transportation systems. Poor housing conditions put individuals at risk due to the decreased levels of “sanitation, overcrowding, and ability to physically distance” from one another (Rollston). Similarly, public transportation also increases the risk of coming in contact with COVID-19 and further transmitting the disease.
Another example of this in our current society that exemplifies the connected systems of oppression that most everyone is aware of is poverty. People of lower socioeconomic status may be living in a way that most others can’t even begin to comprehend. The stigma attached to impoverished people implies that they are lazy individuals who simply don’t feel like working. In fact, the majority of them fight to maintain their less than ideal lifestyle on a day to day basis. Individuals who are stuck in the cycles of poverty make up a labor pool that is willing to pick up the dangerous, temporary, unpaid, undesirable jobs due to the circumstances that they have to live in. The impoverished perform the job duties that must be done in order to keep a society functioning and at an equilibrium. Without people to work undesirable jobs, society would not be stable, revealing the interconnectedness of multiple aspects, such as poverty, and its roles in a society. Structural issues within a society that cause inequality to be present contribute to these social disparities. They give us insight into the inequitable differences in our current social reality.
If only there were a simple solution to such a complex societal issue. How do we break multigenerational cycles of oppression and inequality and get eliminate a socioeconomic hierarchy that dictates how our society functions? Can we imagine a solution that exists without the intertwined social systems that allow society to function as it always has? Awareness of this societal issue has broadened my perspective, but in terms of alleviating it as a whole, I have yet to come up with a concrete solution. For now, being able to understand individuals across the socioeconomic spectrum with empathy and compassion may be the best we can do.
Trauma in America
Deaquan Nichols
Social good is involves services or products that promote human well-being on a large scale. But most of these services and products are ban-aids in a world which needs an antibiotic. As society advances and well-being is promoted, we ignore the equilibrium between humans and our technologies. Technologies have provided us with convenience and safety They save lives. But like Max Weber, I see society becoming more and more machine-like in the process. We live like gods yet forfeit our humanity. We forfeit our altruism in favor of egotism. We have more “social good” in America than ever before, but also more suicides and mental health cases. Why?
Why is it that as “good” increases, “bad” does as well? We live in a society where social media can show us videos of people dying, news can tell us about individuals starving or hungry, and though we feel for these events, the next final exam stresses us out more than anything else. We can watch videos or hear stories about children in pain, but it’s not until our grades decline or we stop being friends with an individual that our days are ruined.
This is the neurology of trauma. Can one truly be traumatized by normalized events? No, of course not. No one is traumatized by missing a school bus or being late to class. But Americans are becoming traumatized only by events that directly affect them. We can watch the news and see stories of college kids drinking themselves into oblivion, yet seldom truly change our behaviors until it happens to someone we know. It is as if we envision the world as a movie, and our personal lives as the only reality.
But why is that? At what point did society take this turn for the worse? One theory is that media has given us common access to traumatizing stories and simultaneously helped us ignore and become desensitized to it. We can acknowledge suffering, become inured against it, and avoid feeling responsibility.
If the stars came out one time a year, wouldn’t we all go outside and just stare at them in awe? Yes, certainly. But what if they’re out every night? Now we don’t work/make the time to acknowledge their beauty. This analogy is very similar to that of our health. If we only had one chance to take care of our bodies, overcome trauma, or overcome depression wouldn’t we all fight a thousand times harder? Yes, certainly. But we live in a world that is full of physical and psychiatric medication. A world where you know you have a million chances to change. And so we’ve begun to lose sight of the importance of the one chance for change.
The Choctaw Ponies of Oklahoma
Teagan Johnson
Looking back at history, there are moments where we are not proud to be Americans. Forcing Natives off their land in the hopes that we would obtain gold was one of those shameful moments. The Trail of Tears resulted in many deaths and permanently altered an entire culture by force. One may think this is something from the past, but we are now repeating history. The only difference is, the natural element is timber this time around and there isn’t any “new” land to push the Choctaw Nation onto again. I hope to help preserve, protect, and perpetuate the Choctaw Ponies of Oklahoma.
This doesn’t just include the care and protection of the breed and their habitat, but also the people of the Choctaw Nation as well. I am gaining knowledge of the courts, psychology, sociology, criminal behavior, law enforcement, as well as military and Native American influences on the Choctaw population. I continue to delve into how they’ve been treated, and how we should treat them in order to avoid another tragic event.
Over the past three years I have visited parts of the Choctaw Nation. This consists of 11,000 square miles in southeastern Oklahoma. The Choctaw Nation assists in the protection and breeding of the last of their equines with Bryant and Darlene Rickman heading The Oklahoma Heritage Horse Sanctuary. Choctaw Ponies are the final breed of horse and have existed since the first days of colonization. These equines remain untouched by modern breeders' hands. They stand between 13 and 15 hands in height and weigh between 750-1000 pounds. In March 2014, the Oklahoma Legislature passed a resolution designating these mustangs as the official Heritage Horse of Oklahoma.
What happens when a community, that is isolated in multiple ways from the rest of the world, can’t be heard? How can they thrive, or even survive, with so many nefarious entities (government greed, unjust local laws, criminal neighbor activity, etc.) competing for their resources (land, horses)? Understanding and being able to combat the criminal element and governmental policies that directly interfere and undermine their existence is paramount to the Choctaw’s viability. By researching their plight and by visiting the Oklahoma herd to interact with them in a hands-on capacity, I can help to safeguard their imperiled legacy and ensure their survival, while shining a light on the Indigenous People of the Choctaw Nation.
Making Connections
Aaron Ringer
Today the world is connected in more ways than ever before. The boom in social media, internet, and even the increased efficiency of transportation has left the world at our fingertips. Yet, the divide between people only continues to grow. Race divides us, and so does consumerism, political parties, and generational values. Businesses often overlook consumers as people. Business ethics is often discussed but in practice largely ignored. Political parties have face increased polarization leading to a volatile political system. Generational divides cause a lack of familiarity and understanding that often leads to conflict within families and between power structures.
I believe the main basis for these problems is a lack of understanding and acceptance. All of these issues stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of others' feelings and needs. On the other hand the groups often will not accept the other side or their needs. Understanding others requires you to step into their shoes. Working towards an empathetic understanding of their situation helps others to recognize the effect of their actions. Secondly, the history of a group or individual can have a large impact on their current perspectives. Learning about these perspectives through history makes it easier for others to empathize with the situation. Finally we need the ability to truly communicate others perspectives, feelings, and situations. In the high-speed world of communication important messages can be lost. People may be less willing to hear what others have to say out of fear that it contradicts their beliefs. However, listening to others in a constructive manner rather than listening for ways that they are wrong is important in increasing your knowledge of their situation.
My own personal example relates to the recent situation regarding Confederate statues being removed. I am a Caucasian person and my initial view of the statues situation was that they are a part of history. However, I began listening to what the Black community was saying and thought back to my knowledge of slavery in the Civil War. Soon, I understood what others felt towards those statues and why these statues had such a strong effect on them. I was able to empathize and think more thoroughly about the situation. The statues may be a part of history but the effect they have on the community make them not worthy of being revered.