Kaweah Delta Health Care District and members of its medical staff will present physician, historian and prize-winning author Victoria Sweet on Thursday, October 16, at the 2014 Norman Sharrer Symposium at the Visalia Fox Theatre.
Dr. Sweet, author of God’s Hotel: a Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine, will discuss critical conversations between patients and their medical providers in today’s healthcare system in a session titled, “Slow Medicine and the Efficiency of Inefficiency.” The symposium will begin at 6:30pm and is free to the public.
“(Dr. Sweet’s) patients’ lives teach us about the challenges of successful caring and healing,” wrote the continuing medical education committee of Kaweah Delta Medical Center in announcing this year’s speaker. “(She) is a keen observer of the legal, political and economic forces that have taken medicine away from its roots and turned it into a complexity that we now call healthcare. She hopes to teach us how the efficiencies and other benefits of slow medicine happen whenever doctors and nurses can take enough time to care for their patients, not just about them.”
Kaweah Delta has hosted the annual Norman Sharrer Symposium for the last 33 years. Each year, a health theme is chosen to interest the community, beyond the confines of just physicians/clinicians in Tulare and Kings Counties.
The event is named after Dr. Norman Sharrer, M.D., who was director of medical education at Kaweah Delta Hospital and associate clinical professor of medicine at the University of California School of Medicine, and a former practicing physician in Exeter prior to his death in August 1980 at the age of 57. He is remembered for his many giving traits, always being ready to help anyone who had a personal crisis, and as an inspiring teacher.