Monday 28 January 2008

Communication Skills

This afternoon we have 4 hours of communication skills, we tend to have 3 or 4 communication sessions scattered througout each clinical year. The sessions do tend to drag a bit but they're certainly not entirely useless. Sessions in the past have included; breaking bad news and dealing with angry patients. They use actors as simulated patients and we each take it in turns to practice situations. This is very useful as it doesn't matter if you make any mistakes or mess up telling someone they're going to die, of course they're not actually going to die as they are actors. But it means that if and when the time comes for you do it for real, you'll at least have some experience of the situation. The dealing with angry patients sessions last year was interesting, the actors are very good and do tend to get quite into their character so it can be quite realistic.

This afternoon's session is on ethics, I suspect this should be quite useful as we don't do ethics at any other time really.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Do you do listening skills as well? I've lost track of the ammount of SHOs and Regs that only hear what they want to hear. Doesn't matter if I put it "patient speak" or in medical terminology. Last admission I sat and screamed at the stoma nurse "no one is actually listening to a word I say".

It's bad enough that so many have such a basic lack of knowledge of anatomy, the ammount of blank looks I get when I try and explain I had a sub total colectomy and end ileo followed by a completion proctectomy... you had what??!arghhhh

Rant over! I'm sure you are wonderful though!!