Effective communication can bridge the gap between patients, promoting feelings of support, trust, and engagement with your advice. It can also help to recover health indicators like blood pressure and blood sugar levels.
Healthcare provider communication is a crucial healthcare skill. Good communication has extensive effects, ranging from poor patient satisfaction to treatment confusion and low patient commitment.
Here, we will discuss strategies for healthcare providers to improve patient communication.
Follow Soft Communication Skills
“Soft” communication skills, like understanding, active listening, and other non-verbal signals, are equally as significant as the information conveyed. Factors such as patient perception and experience can significantly impact the quality of care provided.
After all, patients constantly desire to feel their requirements are being taken seriously and their providers genuinely listen to them.
Hire a Translator and Culturally Competent Staff
Healthcare environments should be safe and comprehensive, avoiding inequity like racism, xenophobia, classism, homophobia, sexism, or other forms of injustice. Healthcare organizations should hire translators to guarantee that all patients can communicate efficiently.
Healthcare providers’ hearing and participation are fundamental rights for every patient, ensuring culturally competent and effective treatment. Translators help guarantee healthcare organizations identify and complete this right.
Alternative and Complementary Therapies
The increasing public interest in alternative and complementary therapies may be due to patients’ easier understanding of practitioners’ language. The close understanding between lay therapists and patients makes them more attractive than remote doctors due to their qualifications and training.
Alternative therapists often provide patients with a narrative about disease causes and treatment implications, usually lacking evidence or biological validity.
Conflicting Views of Patients and Doctors
Doctors focus on providing information or advice to patients, neglecting the crucial purpose of communication: initiating and improving patient relationships. One literature analysis found less than 5% of doctors’ remarks in medical consultations were welcoming or friendly.
A study revealed that 25% of medical consultations do not include the patient’s chief concerns. It is also noted that 40% of cancer specialists agree patients prefer not to know too much about their condition.
47.7% of cancer patients reported lacking knowledge about their disease’s management, despite the majority expressing a desire for such information.
Be Attentive
In a hectic environment, people are very jobbish. They walk around with to-do lists flooding their brains. It makes sense that patients may feel like people are speaking to others rather than them. It would help if you encouraged your patients to interact with people during their practice of being present.
Breathe deeply, stop your mind from running, and focus on the moment and now to practice being present. Lean forward, open your palms, turn your body to face the patient thoroughly, smile, and make eye contact.
Give the person in front of you your whole attention at the right moment. Refrain from giving your plans for the remainder of the day a second thought.
Mediation Training
Mediation training teaches managers and healthcare providers the expertise to effectively manage a potentially challenging discussion. They learn to promote open conversation about complex topics and create a path of action to cure the situation.
Mediator training is a well-known procedure for healthcare providers. This mediator training procedure helps examine the problem, check the primary distress, and determine which issues are indicative and fundamental. This gives them the structure to come up with a long-term answer.
