What are some broad communication techniques?
Start by assessing what the patient knows or understands already. This can be as simple as asking, “What have the other doctors told you so far? I want to make sure I’m starting in the right place.” You’re asking for data about what their level of comprehension is and their level of coping. Patients who tell you, “nobody’s told me anything” could mean they really haven’t been told anything. But they also might mean they were told something but were so upset they didn’t retain it. Those are valuable data telling you where to start—at square one. A second rule is to consider the patient as a TV with two channels. One is the cognitive channel, which is what patients understand, and then there’s the emotional channel. What are the patients experiencing, how are they coping, what’s the emotional data you’re getting from them? The most common pitfall I see is that physicians concentrate on the cognitive channel and totally skip the emotional one, thinking it’s irrelevant or will take too muc
