Schwartz Rounds

Helping Hospital Staff Deal with the Emotional Side of Caregiving

Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital–Milton hosts Schwartz Center Rounds, a national program that helps hospital staff explore and process the emotions that come up in their daily work.

How Schwartz Rounds Work

Schwartz Rounds provides a unique forum for caregivers to discuss and reflect upon the emotional challenges of patient care. Sessions typically begin with a brief panel presentation of a patient case, followed by a guided discussion.

Rather than simply focusing on the clinical facts of a patient case or problem-solving, Schwartz Rounds gives healthcare workers a safe forum to talk about how they experienced certain situations. Popular discussions include:

• Caring for a colleague
• Dealing with spiritual crises in patients
• Delivering bad news
• When cultural and religious beliefs conflict with medical advice

Benefits of Schwartz Rounds

Benefits of Schwartz Rounds include:

• Improved emotional connections between caregivers and patients.
• Enhanced understanding of the effects of illness on patients and their families.
• Improved communication among caregivers.
• Decreased feelings of caregiver isolation and stress.

History of Schwartz Rounds

Schwartz Rounds are the signature program of the Kenneth B. Schwartz Center, a Boston-based nonprofit whose mission is to support and advance compassionate health care. Healthcare attorney Kenneth Schwartz created the center just days before he died of lung cancer in 1995.

The center advances the ideas, hopes and concerns expressed in an article Schwartz wrote for Boston Globe magazine. "As skilled and knowledgeable as my caregivers are, what matters most is that they have empathized with me in a way that gives me hope and makes me feel like a human being, not just an illness," Schwartz wrote.

Learn more about Schwartz Rounds and The Schwartz Center.