ASSUMPTIONS ARE EASY to make and betray our own experiences and biases. Several decades ago, when admitting a baby to the intensive care unit, I made a quick assumption about who the mother of the infant was.

There were two women in the waiting room, and I decided that one was the mother and the other woman was her sister. The couple laughed it off, but I knew by their faces that I had hurt them at a time when they were particularly vulnerable.

Changing from holding assumptions to becoming an ally is an important shift in approach when you work in healthcare. It’s a change which makes a substantial difference to the quality of care and outcome for many patients and their families.

In healthcare, we expect people to give us access to their bodies and minds. We ask them to trust us with delicate information about their habits, their finances, their employment and relationships. The unspoken bargain behind the intense questioning is that when patients confide in us, we will keep this information safe and use it only to further their health interests. We ask complete strangers to trust us with their lives.

That trust is fundamental to healthcare, and it is easily broken.

Assumptions have the effect of erasing individual identity. I didn’t see two........

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