communicate differently to different people

Hi guys, hope you guys enjoy your placement, I am going to talk about the differences between the communication of colleagues, patients and family members. I am now at neuro placement and I find that communication is particularly important in this area as in I got to deal with different people everyday and also explain the same information or message in different ways, which I find it challenging.

First of all, communicate with the patient who has dysphasia and dysprexia. How? He hardly understand you and can only say ‘yes’ or ‘no’, also poor ability to follow command. Sometimes the command we learnt at school will not be so helpful in this case because those patients will have unbelievable response like when I asked the patient to side steps to the middle of the bar but he ended up turning himself in a circle. Therefore verbally command got to be very simple and concise and also rather than saying ‘bend both knees up, hand on the tummy, reach over and turn to the side, drop your leg down to the edge of the bed at the same time push up from the hand and sit up’, simply saying ‘sit up’ will make the life more earlier for you as well as your patient because those patients just do not have these kind of concept and sequence in their mind so commands have to be functional. More importantly, providing manual input at the same time gives them feedback for those patients to follow the movement you want him to do which improve their motor learning.

Communicate with the family member is challenging as they will ask you some questions that you have no idea to how to answer it, and they will remember every single word you say. So I think that confidence is an essential element as they really trust what you say about the condition and the exercise program. If you do not show confident enough they will not trust you that will affect the rapport or relationship between you as a therapist and the patient’s family. It is challenging for the student since we have not qualified yet, but it does not mean we cannot do it. Just say ‘I don’t know’ or ‘not sure’ and give them direction of what people what should ask for and it will be fine.

Finally, communicate with the supervising physios, well you cannot talk too much or talk very little to them and the quality of the content is very important. Before treatment tell them what you are going to do on the patient and suggest some possible treatment progression, after the treatment tell them what u ended up doing and what they are up to because that is what they mean by communication.

Last but not least, communication is vastly helpful tool for us to deliver my message to someone from not knowing to knowing. Since we are in a people orientated profession, we must encounter different people from different background or group in some sort so that we need to fine tune and adapt the content we speck accordingly to our target group and deliver the message that they will understand.