A friend shared her recent encounter with a healthcare professional: “24 months ago I was diagnosed with Stage 1 breast cancer. I met with my oncologist and had successful surgery, followed by chemotherapy, radiation and then an injection every 3 weeks for a year. The oncologist prescribed a single tablet a day for 5 years to decrease the probability of recurrence and assured me I would feel stronger and better. After 3 months I wasn’t feeling any better and went back to the oncologist and explained the medicine was not working as advertised. My oncologist expressed no understanding of the human side of my reaction to the tablet-a day. Instead, the oncologist focused their attention on the computer screen.”
Is this a common healthcare experience?
Time with a healthcare professional IS precious. Patients ARE needy. Clearly, managing the time better while not losing the human touch is optimal.
Balancing “head” and “heart” is required – between the “head” of efficiency and the “heart” of caring.
Our healthcare professional is challenged daily to deliver:
a) the volume which serves the business of care
b) meet and adapt to the individual in their care
c) achieve optimal patient satisfaction scores
In attempting to do ALL of the above, our healthcare professionals often find themselves talking more and listening less.
Many healthcare professionals lack formal training in the facilitative skills needed to listen effectively, manage team dynamics, and ensure patients feel heard and understood.
Facilitation training provides practical tools and techniques to help develop crucial soft skills, including learning to be more concise, ask powerful questions, bracket their thinking to truly listen and adapt their communication style.
Core Competencies That Matter Most for Healthcare Professionals
Healthcare professionals are well-trained technically AND face a steep learning curve when it comes to working collaboratively with others and communicating effectively with patients.
In general, several core competencies matter most for healthcare professionals.
Increasing Capability and Confidence to Diagnose
Executive presence in healthcare involves the ability to diagnose effectively and with confidence.
This includes the capability to reflect on one’s own experience and adapt communication style to the context, the patient, and the immediate need of the moment.
Navigating Time Constraints and Communication Frameworks
Face time with patients can be the key differentiator between adequate, high-quality care and a missed opportunity.
It’s also a difficult dynamic to get right.
Spend too much time with a single patient, and you may not be accounting for the business needs appropriately. Spend too little time and you may miss a diagnosis or care opportunity that can impact someone’s overall healthcare outcomes.
That’s why understanding the practical timeframes available for patient interactions is so crucial for concise and effective communication.
At the same time, the diagnosis must be adapted to the ear, the mind, the heart, and the spirit of the patient.
The Emotional Intelligence Trifecta
Effective communication demands extraordinary emotional intelligence (understanding one’s own biases and reactions), social intelligence (understanding the impact of interactions on others), and contextual intelligence (recognizing how location, like LA versus rural Iowa or a warzone, alters patient needs and expectations).
How Facilitative Skills Directly Enhance Communication and Confidence
Facilitative skills directly enhance communication and confidence. Here’s how.
Building Patient Trust Through Active Questioning
The healthcare professional’s ability to ask open-ended questions and pursue with follow-up questions creates in the patient a belief that they can confide in and open up to the healthcare professional.
Ensuring Understanding Through Reflection and Paraphrasing
Reflecting back the exact words a patient has used assures them that they have been heard.
As Oprah Winfrey explained in her final show, “I’ve talked to nearly 30,000 people on this show, and all 30,000 had one thing in common: They all wanted validation…They want to know: ‘Do you see me? Do you hear me? Does what I say mean anything to you?’”
Paraphrasing, by contrast, invites the attending health care professional to let the patient know their words have been understood, comprehended, and returned to them with care and attention.
For example, a recent follow-up visit with a physician demonstrated these principles. The physician had taken the trouble to read the patient’s case file beforehand and reflected on a previous conversation about high blood pressure.
Using data from a physician assistant, they explained that very little had changed in six months and asked if the patient would be open to beginning a low dose of medication to counter the higher blood pressure number.
This data-driven approach, combined with open-ended questions, reflection, and paraphrasing, instilled increased confidence in the patient.
The physician’s willingness to bring in a supervisor to validate their findings and proposal further solidified trust, leading to easy agreement on the proposed course of action.
Three Practical Strategies to Get Started
For healthcare professionals, there are practical strategies that can help develop the core competencies needed to thrive.
#1 Leverage Self-Awareness (Introversion vs. Extraversion)
Physicians, regardless of experience level, can benefit from being self-aware as to whether they are introverted or extraverted in their way of processing information, referencing the Myers-Briggs (E or I).
#2 Practice Brevity with Meaning and Impact
Practice what you will say to a patient if you have 90 seconds, or if you have 3 minutes. These are different contexts that require conciseness and precision to maintain meaning and impact.
#3 Structure Conversations (Openings, Narrowings, and Closings)
Leverage the understanding that all conversations naturally go through openings, narrowings, and closings.
The physician has a limited time with each patient. Part of that conversation is an exploration or opening, somewhat like a brainstorm, but building on previous meetings.
However, the patient wishes to end up walking out with a diagnosis, which means physicians must begin to narrow the scope of everything that was discussed in that opening five to ten minutes.
The Next Step for Our Beloved Healthcare Professionals
As healthcare professionals bring their extensive and valued clinical knowledge to interaction with patients, some grapple with the unspoken challenges of that interaction.
The pressure to perform can inadvertently lead to a communication dynamic where listening takes a backseat, leaving patients feeling unheard, misunderstood and potentially undermining the very trust essential for effective care.
In many cases we have neglected to prepare healthcare professionals for the nuanced, human-centric aspects of their demanding roles. We can prepare healthcare professionals today to meet their patients where they are and collaborate with their staff with skill and precision.
Significant healthcare providers are already taking up the challenge of equipping the next generation of healthcare professionals with the skills they need to best connect with their patients and collaborate with their colleagues.
The team at Kaiser Permanente Mid-Atlantic provides a one-day onboarding course for all new physicians focused on four habits of human interaction or meeting between a physician and a patient.
They are equipping every healthcare professional to prepare for their patient interactions, engage intentionally when meeting with them, and follow through after they leave. It’s a powerful framework for any healthcare provider.
Empowering healthcare professionals with facilitative training can help bridge the “head” and “heart” gap – between clinical expertise and compassionate, connected and collaborative communication.
Michael J. Reidy
Michael J. Reidy, a senior consultant at Interaction Associates, has more than 25 years of experience in consulting and responding to the learning needs of individuals & groups in the healthcare, biotech, financial services,, power, and service industries. Michael’s interest is in adult education, and his belief is that the workplace has become the ‘third place’ of learning and development for the 21st century. Michael holds a master’s degree in Public Administration from the HKS, Harvard University. Interaction Associates is best known for introducing the concept and practice of group facilitation to the business world in the early 1970’s. For over 50 years, IA has provided thousands of leaders and teams with practical, simple, and effective programs, tools, and techniques for leading, meeting, and working better across functions, viewpoints, and geographies.
