Improving consultations between health-care professionals and older clients: implications for pharmacists

Consultations between pharmacists and many clients are now federally mandated in the United States, but guidelines have not been developed for communication in this context. This article reviews research on communication between clients and health-care professionals in order to help develop recommendations for consultations between pharmacists and older clients. The review is organized around a collaborative approach to health communication, which identifies strategies by which speakers and listeners work together to achieve mutually defined goals. This approach is used to analyze cognitive processes underlying communication during pharmacist consultations. This review suggests that miscommunication often reflects a break-down in collaboration between health-care professional and clients. Recommendations are developed to improve collaboration, including suggestions for initiating consultations, presenting easy to understand messages, and monitoring to ensure that the messages are mutually understood. Most important, successful collaboration requires tailoring strategies to individual clients rather than basing communication on general assumptions about clients.