What is it about?
The seven step PROGRAM is outlined, providing instructions for physicians and other health care workers to follow to deliver tragic news to patients and families. This approach to learning compassionate communication skills, is tested and proven to ensure practitioners feel prepared to deliver news to patients with compassion, competence and reassurance. This approach helps doctors make a connection to patients which is linked to improving health care quality.
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Why is it important?
For health care professionals, the ability to handle patient communication compassionately is a career imperative. Compassionate communication results in a host of positives. Diagnostic accuracy improves as patients open up and are willing to share complete health information with physicians. Additionally, adherence increases as patients gain an improved understanding of their conditions and the rationale behind their treatment plans. The net result of all the types of improvements that are caused by this type of training, is better patient experience. Better patient experience is now linked directly to financial performance.
Perspectives
While completing my residency, I witnessed a highly-respected veteran doctor mishandle an interaction with a patient. I saw the immediate distress it caused the patient and the emotional aftershock it caused for the Doctor. That one experience set in motion what became my career-long pursuit to understand and share methods to improve critical communication moments. That one moment caused the realization that medical school did not train doctors on techniques to how to manage difficult dialogues. Providing physicians with the missing education on how to use compassionate communication skills and techniques is my lifelong passion.
Anthony Orsini
Winnie Palmer Hospital
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Get With the PROGRAM: A Guide to Compassionate Communication, Journal of Osteopathic Medicine, October 2018, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.7556/jaoa.2018.149.
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