Annette Montoya, NP, on Caring for Patients Through Listening

BCH Listens: In our latest video for our organization-wide initiative on listening, Annette Montoya, NP, explains her approach to patient care.

"Listening has helped me figure out how to really zone in on how to help that person the best I can," Montoya said.

"My approach to listening to patients is sitting down on the bed, talking eye-to-eye, and asking them what can I do for them, or what's going on today. I try not to go in with their diagnoses or
an agenda but to try to find out what they need from me that day," she said.

Montoya recently had a patient who fell. Her providers believed she had something called "gait instability." But in talking to the patient, Montoya found that she had actually blacked out.

"She said, 'I didn't fall, I went down on the ground and I have no memory of this.' Then we started to talk about her past medical history and how that tied in with her heart disease, open heart surgery, a-fib, and we're starting to zone in on why she actually fell. She didn't indeed trip -- she blacked out. So, I think, talking to the patient and really trying to understand what happened to them and their sequence of events is really helpful in treating them."

For more information, go to bch.org/BCHListens.