No news is not good news
Am I doing all the talking?
If you’re explaining something and notice yourself doing all the talking this is a great cue to yourself to stop and check-in.
Read more for tips and making sure your patient is on board with your discussion.
Checking For Understanding
You’ve taken the history made the diagnosis and come up with the management plan. You’re on the home straight.
All that’s left is to make sure your patient is able to follow the treatment plan.
Here is where it can all fall apart.
This post talks about how we can use communication skills to set our patients up for successful self-management of their health, and better outcomes.
Finessing Clinical Handover
With the increasing complexity of our work it has never been more important to have safe, effective and accurate clinical handover.
When trying to achieve the best patient care we aim to prepare and plan for everything, and clinical handover is no exception. However, sometimes our best laid plans can be thrown off course.
This blog post discusses some clinical handover pitfalls to look out for, and some communication skill strategies to help.
What’s there to learn about listening anyway?
Have you had the experience of not feeling heard?
The quality of our listening can have a signficant impact on how successful a conversation is.
This post explores how listening can affect whether we achieve what we hope for in clinical conversations and interactions.
What's your listening like?
Open Disclosure: Communicate for better outcomes
What can we do to be prepared to provide the best care following an episode of healthcare harm?
Communicating about the harm, and providing best care happen alongside each other, we need the skills to do both.
This blog post features important considerations for open disclosure and highlights the risk of a poorly managed communication.
Unrealistic Expectations?
Goals of care conversations that promote shared decision-making are essential. But what to do if your medical recommendations don’t align with the patient’s thoughts about effective treatments?
Here, we look at the concept of “unrealistic expectations” or mismatched agendas, reframing these as an opportunity to connect and understand our patient’s values around life, serious illness and death, as well as to share with them information relevant to the goals of care discussion.
Thinking About Saving Time
Saving time is one of our biggest challenge as busy clinicians. There’s so much information to gather and decisions to make.
We ideally want our patients to feel heard, and address their most pressing concerns.
Luckily with some simple steps we can do both. Here are some brief tips on balancing structure and relationship in our clinical conversations.
Reframing the “can of worms”
The “can of worms”. A phrase I hear from time to time from learners in communication skills sessions, referring to concerns about expression of emotions.
However, far from being a distraction, emotional expressions from patients are valuable data about what matters most to them, and will help with shared decision-making about their care.
Reframing the “can of worms” as important data, and using effective strategies to respond to emotion, can transform a clinical conversation, getting to the point more quickly, with more meaning for the patient and better rapport.
Silence is Golden
Reflections on making the most of those rich, quiet conversational moments where all might be revealed… and thoughts on being conscious of the impact of interruptions.
