Celebrating primary care by telling stories

Photos by Rob Carlin

UMass Chan Family Medicine Residency Director Stacy Potts, MD, reads her story about the joys of maternal and child care at “Celebrating Primary Care Storytelling,” held in honor of National Primary Care Week.

Because primary care providers care for people at all ages—from birth to death and every other point along life’s continuum—they have the opportunity to learn valuable lessons about humanity from their patients. Some of those lessons have been captured in writing through Thursday Morning Memos, the Department of Family Medicine & Community Health’s weekly narrative medicine series. 

To mark National Primary Care Week at UMass Medical School, on Wednesday, Oct. 5, the Lamar Soutter Library’s Humanities in Medicine Committee and the Massachusetts Area Health Education Centers Network hosted “Celebrating Primary Care Storytelling,” readings of Thursday Morning Memos by the primary care physicians and physicians-in-training who wrote them.

Originated at UMMS by Hugh Silk, MD, associate professor of family medicine & community health, Thursday Morning Memos is UMass Medical School’s version of narrative medicine, in which students, residents and faculty of the department and, sometimes, other primary care departments, reflect on outcomes, honor relationships and explore meaning in their work through writing about their experiences with patients. Like the practice of family medicine itself, primary care stories span the gamut of life experiences, from profound to mundane. Acknowledging successes while considering what they might do differently next time can also help refresh and fortify the writers for the difficult work they do day in and day out.

“Through Thursday Morning Memos, Hugh Silk has managed to take humanities in medicine and make it a concrete and everyday practice for primary care physicians at UMMS,” said Ellen More, PhD, professor of psychiatry and head of the Soutter Library’s Office of Medical History and Archives, in her opening remarks for the event.

Dr. Silk continues work to expand Thursday Morning Memos to other departments at UMMS and, ultimately, to other medical schools. Now in the habit of encouraging submissions at every opportunity he gets, he explained, “All of us have at least one story a day.”

The following excerpts from the evening’s readers highlight just a few of those stories.

Stacy Potts, MD, assistant professor of family medicine & community health and director of the UMass Chan Family Medicine Residency, shared her passion for being present at births, each unique but perfect in its own way.

In her essay called “Photographs,” third-year resident Katrina Austria, MD, learned something about family life when she visited a patient nearing death.