Ilse Tikkanen’s advice for how caregivers should treat patients can be boiled down to this simple phrase: Walk in their shoes.
For the past six years, Tikkanen has been the coordinator of the Bariatric Center of Excellence at Wheaton Franciscan Healthcare-Elmbrook Memorial Hospital. The center provides surgical services to obese patients who have been unsuccessful with other weight loss efforts.
She oversees the care provided by the nursing staff and contacts patients before and after surgery to determine their need for more education or follow-up care. Her patients, peers and surgeons consider her “the expert” in how to care for bariatric patients.
“Ilse is regularly identified in patient comments as the person who was pivotal in the success of the patient’s surgical experience and made a true change in their entire life,” says Maureen Furno, administrator for patient care services at Elmbrook Memorial.
Tikkanen is keenly aware of how bariatric patients, 70 percent of whom are women, feel about themselves. Not only are they dealing with the physical effects their weight has on their overall health, they’re also struggling with the psychological impact. It’s no wonder, Tikkanen says, that a majority of the center’s patients are dealing with some form of depression.
To help ensure the center’s patients receive the best care possible, Tikkanen developed sensitivity training sessions for all hospital staff and personnel who come into contact with bariatric patients. The “bariatric inclusion and respect plan” that she developed focuses on eliminating stereotyping and other negative behaviors toward “people of size.”
“We make people aware of how their words can hurt another person,” Tikkanen says.
She helps the staff appreciate how insensitive comments – even those that are unintended – can harm a bariatric patient’s frame of mind. After one morbidly obese patient told Tikkanen that people in everyday society rarely make eye contact with her, Tikkanen told the center’s staff that they should always know the color of their patients’ eyes.
“Under Ilse’s leadership, we have a holistic approach for our patients,” Furno says. “We anticipate their nursing care needs, eliminating those uncomfortable requests for a larger chair or bigger gown.”
That might sound like a simple approach, but for the Bariatric Center’s patients it makes all the difference in the world.
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