This post is about conflict management, personal safety, and Dynamis training. As vehicles for our training content in Healthcare Communication for one Emergency Department team, I developed a set of common target scenarios from the information I gathered in talking with the management, the learning development team, and the staff themselves.
We worked through these scenarios in the training, ranging from easy situations — such as encountering somebody who looks lost in the emergency department — all the way through to the more difficult situations where a patient is refusing treatment and deciding to leave the department and cancel.
In practising these encounters, it was really interesting to see staff coming from different cultural, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds interacting with patients in strikingly different ways. It became a huge effort for me to make sure that people didn’t revert to diagnostic and control-type language.
Three Types of Language in Healthcare Communication
Research has explored three types of Healthcare Communication used by physicians with their patients:
- Content — gathering, assessment, diagnosis.
- Process — orientation, explaining, preparing expectations.
- Emotional — validating, empathising, warmth, humour, addressing worries.
📊 Research finding: Physicians were in trouble when there was significant divergence in Category 3 communication. In short: less emotion = more lawsuits filed against physicians.
Empathy and Connection in Healthcare Communication
Instead, we asked staff to focus on using empathetic and connecting-type language — words that would help them to demonstrate real concern, to genuinely understand the patient, and to connect with them in such a human way that the interaction goes smoothly. The patient feels listened to, feels that they have rapport with the medical professional, and so can open up and describe more completely how they were feeling, what they were worried about, what concerns they have, and what reservations they might have about the treatment.
As we practised scenarios over and over again, it was important to continually remind staff to show their warmth, to connect with people, to not be afraid to make the interaction more human, and to slow down — to create as much time as they could to do these things in order to have a more successful interaction with their patients, every day.
Here’s a video which supports the ideas in our article about healthcare communication:
Further Reading on Communication Skills
Resources on language and Healthcare Communication skills:
Dynamis provides a comprehensive conflict resolution training programme which spans the whole spectrum of encounters in a hospital environment. In this series of posts, our Director of Training reflects on key ideas in reducing conflict in the hospital.
This guide on conflict management, personal safety, and Dynamis training is part of our ongoing work with schools and academies.