Communications Course for Polyclinic Doctors
Apart from biomedical tasks of diagnosing and treating a patient's illness, good communications is an important and necessary dimension of a doctor's consultation tasks. The communications aspect (engaging, empathizing, educating and enlisting the patient) may often take the back seat in a busy outpatient clinic for one of the many stressors that the doctor faces is time constraint, yet a frequent grouse that patients surface is that the doctor had come across as 'uncaring', 'rushed' or 'had not spent enough time'. The Communications Course for Polyclinic Doctors is thus designed to address this issue.
Course
The course emphasizes that time is a perception; good communications does not necessarily take up too much extra time and teaches skills by way of role playing, video clip analysis, small group sharing and short didactics padded with personal anecdotal encounters from trainers and trainees. Participants learn and apply skills on how to deliver bad news and handle angry patients using commonly encountered case scenarios.