Improving provider-patient communication skills among doctors and nurses in the children’s Emergency Department

Abstract

Background: Effective communication is of paramount importance in delivering patient-centred care. Effective communication between the healthcare personnel and the patient leads to better compliance, better health outcomes, decreased litigation, and higher satisfaction for both doctors and patients. Objective: The objective of the study was to evaluate the effectiveness of a comprehensive blended communication program to improve the communication skills and the confidence level of all staff of a department of emergency medicine in Singapore in dealing with challenging communication situations. Methods: All doctors and nurses working in the selected Children’s Emergency Department (ED) attended blended teaching to improve communication skills. Qualitative feedback was gathered from participants via feedback forms and focus group interviews. Communication-related negative feedback in the ED was monitored over a period of 18 months, from 1st July 2017 to 31st December 2018. Results: Immediately after the course, 95% of the participants felt that they were able to better frame their communications. Focus group interviews revealed four main themes: (A) Increased empowerment of staff; (B) Improved focus of communication with parents; (C) Reduced feeling of incompetence when dealing with difficult parents and; (D) Increased understanding of main issues and parental needs. There was 81.8% reduction in communication-related negative feedback received in the ED monthly after the workshop had been carried out (95% confidence interval 0.523, 0.8182). Conclusion: A comprehensive blended communication workshop resulted in a perceived improvement of communication skills among the healthcare personnel and significantly decreased the communication-related negative feedback in a pediatric ED.

Educational programmes for paediatric healthcare professionals in patient- and family-centred care. A scoping review

“…Several studies evaluated the education at more than one level (Table 1 ), but most of them were evaluated on level two (learning) and assessed for whether the programme caused changes in knowledge, skills, attitude, confidence, and commitment (Tables 1 and 2 ). The least frequent level of evaluation was level 4 (results), which we found in 11 of 49 reports, with intended outcomes described on an organisational level, such as feedback from parents about satisfaction with the communication or quality of care, parent- and youth-rated mental illness symptoms, and functioning or medical errors [ 21 , 23 – 26 , 47 , 48 , 51 , 63 , 66 , 67 ]. Table 2 describes which assessment methods we identified within the identified six groups of educational strategies, and which we classified in accordance with Kirkpatrick levels.…”

“…As proposed in the six-step approach, we suggest that local needs should always be assessed [ 70 ]. Some studies clearly followed the six-step approach for curriculum development for medical education, with one study in particular standing out in terms of adhering to the six-step model by describing each step and distinctly basing the education on local needs [ 48 ].…”

Teleconferencing as a teaching modality for clinical year medical students: Lessons from COVID-19

“…• The supplemental use of standardised patients (Peters & Thrien, 2020) hones student's clinical competence while facilitating the training of relevant skills needed for future practice (Khoo et al, 2020), a notable example in these evolving recent times also includes that of telemedicine (Williams & Song, 2016).…”