How healthcare fails to listen: Unheard
Dr. Rageshri Dhairyawan receives rave reviews for uncovering how healthcare has lost the art of listening in her book ‘Unheard: The Medical Practice of Silencing’.
Drawing on her experiences as both an NHS doctor and a patient, Dr Rageshri’s book explores how healthcare’s failures to listen to patients can cause harm, widen health inequalities and lead to both patients and doctors feeling ‘unheard’.
Through historical analysis and real-life examples, Unheard highlights the many reasons why patients feel like they are not listened to, including the lack of research into healthcare within minority ethnic groups, and how staff burn out can result in patients being treated with less empathy and not fully heard.
Dr Dhairyawan’s insights offer a prescription for positive change and challenges clinicians to reassess how they listen to those that seek their expertise.
“In 2013, I was admitted to the hospital with excruciating abdominal pain due to my endometriosis flaring up during fertility treatment. To my dismay, throughout my admission, I was denied adequate pain relief by the staff and made to feel like a fraud or attention-seeker. I think this was partly due to my gender and ethnicity, and stereotypes of being ‘an anxious south Asian woman’.
“I felt silenced. I wondered, if this could happen to me, a senior NHS doctor, what happens to everyone else? To those who can’t speak English, or don’t have someone to advocate for them? To those with life-threatening illnesses?
"For a long time afterward, I felt guilty for not speaking up. I wrote Unheard to break this silence, for my patients who come from marginalised groups and to understand why, as doctors, we do not always listen well.”
Read reviews and interviews
- iNewspaper: If you've ever been dismissed by a doctor, read this book
- The Lancet journal
- The Times: If a female doctor gets treated like this, what hope is there for women?
- The British Journal Of General Practice and Family Medicine