The second edition of Listening for What Matters: Avoiding Contextual Errors in Health Care, was published in August 2023 and is available from Oxford University Press USA.

This updated edition describes new studies and projects we’ve undertaken since the 1st edition was published in 2016, including our audio recording quality improvement projects in the VA Health Care System and development and testing of electronic health record tools to help physicians recognize patient life context and avoid contextual errors in real time. We’ve also revised the introduction and the text throughout to streamline our definitions and descriptions of contextual care for the reader newer to our work.

Saul Weiner’s new book, On Becoming A Healer: The Journey from Patient Care to Caring about Your Patients is slated for release by Johns Hopkins University Press on April 7, 2020.

You can learn more about it, read the amazing reviews it’s already received from leaders in health care, and pre-order the book at https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/becoming-healer

Winner of the 2017 PROSE Award for Excellence in Biological and Life Sciences, as well as Nursing and Allied Health subject category awards! Our book, Listening for What Matters: Avoiding Contextual Errors in Health Care, published January 2016, is available from Oxford University Press USA.

We argue that physicians are not all prepared to understand patients’ individual life contexts and tailor their medical care to the patient. This problem is real, pervasive, costly, and not addressed by the American health care system or process of medical education. Using the results of hundreds of medical visits in which actors and real patients wore hidden recorders, the book give examples of crucial patient context that physicians failed to appreciate and the medical errors that can result from this failure. It tells the stories of patients whose care was compromised by these failures, and the research that revealed the magnitude of the problem. It explains how these errors can be minimized through changes in how doctors are trained, changes in how medicine is practiced and paid for, and ways for patients to assert their individual circumstances during visits.

You can order the book from Oxford University Press, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other bookstores.

You can also hear Saul discuss this research at this Schwartz Center for Compassionate Care webinar: