In a continuing effort to partner with policyholders, Princeton Insurance is pleased to offer you an opportunity to improve your risk management practices and earn continuing education credit.
Communication breakdowns can and often do occur in many phases of the clinician-patient encounter. These impediments to a constructive dialogue have become the focus of patient safety initiatives. Such initiatives aim to increase safety in the delivery of healthcare and improve outcomes for those you treat. Effective communication equates to more satisfied patients – and the more satisfied your patient, the less likely your risk for a claim alleging malpractice.
Several Princeton Insurance healthcare risk consultants are trained instructors, certified by the Institute for Healthcare Communication (IHC, formerly The Bayer Institute) to provide communication courses for physicians. In addition to acquiring new and refined communication skills, clinicians who successfully complete one or more of these workshops will earn continuing education credits.
Courses now offered include:
Ø Clinician-Patient Communication to Enhance Healthcare Outcomes
Ø Communicating Unanticipated Outcomes and Medical Errors
Ø Strangers in Crisis
Clinician-Patient Communication to Enhance Healthcare Outcomes (CPC)
Overview
CPC reframes the clinician-patient relationship, extending the paradigm beyond the traditional diagnosis-treatment model (“find it, fix it”). Elements of effective communication patterns enhance this treatment model, thereby forging a stronger, more reliable partnership between you and your patient.
The goal is to involve the patient from the outset in their care, by eliciting cooperation with, participation in and adherence to proposed treatment plans. Unlike previous clinician-patient relationships, in this new partnership, you and the patient together work to identify issues and design a response that is amenable and achievable.
Few clinicians are taught effective communication techniques during their professional training. So it is little surprise that these skill sets are acquired “on the job” – a job which affords little time, insufficient constructive feedback, or coaching to correct and hone vital interpersonal skills.
Communicating Unanticipated Outcomes and Medical Errors (CUOME)
Overview
Grounded in the patient safety objectives, which have gained momentum within the health care delivery sector, Communication techniques and skills are recognized as being vital to clarifying issues at the most stressful moments in a patient encounter in order to make sound decisions regarding treatment. Allowing for individual communication styles and incorporating a variety of communication guidelines, CUOME offers participants an entertaining and challenging program of didactic learning and activities to engage the professional mind.
As a clinician, you are well aware by this point in time of The Joint Commission standards implemented beginning in 2001 requiring active dialogue with your patients (or their respective representative or guardian) about outcomes that failed to meet expectations - either yours or those of your patient. Supporting The Joint Commission in these initiatives are the AMA, the National Patient Safety Foundation, and a burgeoning trove of literature related to healthcare ethics – all of which encourage a genuine and timely discussion regarding treatment outcomes that failed to meet desired goals. Unplanned occurrences coupled with silence naturally lead the individual to suspect a problem. A lack of discussion leads to suspicion that someone is trying to cover something up. Suspicion unaddressed will eventually turn to thoughts of litigation to get to the root of the matter.
What is needed are clinicians and staff members who are educated and skilled in understanding the importance of effective communication and have developed the means to communicate meaningfully and compassionately with patients and their families when something untoward occurs. The first inclination is to go on the defensive. History has taught us, however, that an approach of empathy is the first step toward a constructive, healing dialogue. A thoughtful response and a caring attitude go far in building a trusting conversation.
Strangers in Crisis (SIC)
Overview
Perhaps nowhere else in the medical community is communication more vital than in the demanding and unforgiving environment of the ED.
Urgent situations and critical decision-making in the ED bring strangers together: clinicians, changing staff members due to shift changes and surroundings and patients with sometimes fragmented medical histories, unfamiliar family members, and so forth. Seeking a resolution to the emergency is everyone’s goal, but often the disparate perspectives regarding the patient and their care unintentionally pit parties against each other. The unfamiliar perpetuates itself when the time comes for the clinician to hand-off the patient to the care of other clinicians and departments – sometimes also strangers to the clinician.
Unlike many a clinician-patient relationship, those forged in the ED are done so with the complicating challenges of time, acuity, complexity and hastily compiled medical information. It is in this environment that you are expected to review the information gathered, make a diagnosis and develop a treatment plan.
To learn more about these courses,please call our toll-free Risk Resources Line at 866-Rx4-Risk.
