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Twelve tips for asking and responding to difficult questions during a challenging clinical encounter
Sophie Soklaridis1, Jonathan J Hunter, Paula Ravitz
1Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Education , Canada and.
Background:
Teaching healthcare providers (HCPs) effective communication skills can be challenging, but is crucial for managing complex patient encounters.
Aim:
To provide medical trainees strategies for recognizing and understanding problematic interactions.
Methods:
The Twelve Tips are based on a study of communication skills teaching with family medicine trainees (n = 26) who received controlled exposure to common clinical difficulties simulated by standardized patients (SPs). The following tips were derived from a thematic analysis of a subset of the transcribed coaching sessions.
Results:
These tips demonstrate that doctor-patient communication difficulties can arise from any of three sources: the patient's issues, the HCP's misunderstanding or inaccurate responsiveness to an issue, and/or the interaction between the HCP and the patient. These tips are heuristically grouped into two themes: (1) guiding principles to hold in mind and (2) behaviors that can be used to apply these principles.
Conclusion:
We believe that these strategies will help trainees to remain attentive to the patient, the interaction, and their own reactions, to improve the overall clinical encounter.
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