Expanding Communication Skills

Hey guys

It is clear from reading these blogs that there have been many lessons learned by each of us this year. The biggest lesson I have learnt this year, by far, has been the importance of developing strong communication skills. In my opinion, you could be the smartest student in your year, but this will not necessarily translate to being a good physio without good communication skills.

Communicating with patients has always come very naturally to me, while the academic side probably hasn’t! In most of my placements my supervisors have noted that one of my greatest strengths is building rapport with patients. However there has been two placements in particular that I have found harder than the others, and these placements have highlighted to me that perhaps my communication skills aren’t as good as I thought they were. These two placements have been in paediatrics and neurology. These placements were more difficult to me because my greatest strength, rapport building, was taken away from me.

In paediatrics I felt just a little uncomfortable when it came to communicating with infants. I had no problem with handling these children, or knowing how I was going to treat them, but I felt extremely silly talking in a baby voice and singing! Building rapport with primary school aged children was fine because I could have a conversation with them and play games. As a result, my treatment of these infants was often ineffective because I did not engage them, and they were therefore less inclined to stay still for any length of time. In neurology, my current placement, I have also found that I need to expand upon the ways in which I communicate. Many of you will know how hard it can be to have a conversation with a dysphasic stroke patient, and not having any neuro exposure before has meant that I have found this quite difficult. This has sometimes been to the detriment of treatment effectiveness as I have been unable to describe to the patient exactly what it is I want them to do.

The point of this blog (or the take home message if I were Tom Briffa) is that you can’t use the exact same method of communication for every single patient you see. It is important to develop good communication skills (both verbal and non verbal) for different age groups, different racial backgrounds, for those who can’t speak English, and for those with dysphasia, to name a few. Like most things, this is developed with experience and exposure to these types of patients, and I have since learnt to use different strategies to communicate with these patients (including singing! Poor kids).