Doctors Bearing “Bad News” to Patients Without Being Bad News Themselves
On the Emotional Intelligence (EI) front, here is an interesting video, called Giving Bad News, from Drexel University Medical School that you may want to share with any doctors you know – especially ones who find themselves in the position of telling their patients really devastating news. The tension between professional detachment and emotional connections in traditional medicine is still an issue, even though most patients seem to prefer connectivity.
Actually, this training video (one of forty communications training modules for docs and med students) may be useful as a model for lots of difficult conversations. While there are a few little points we could quibble with – like the doc not offering any sympathy to the patient - it does show the importance of being in the right setting, being physically present and engaged, being clear about the message, creating sufficient time and space (i.e. being silent) to allow the receiver of the information to process and react emotionally, asking permission to add more information, being descriptive rather than predictive, resisting the urge to offer false hope, and being very clear about next steps.
Another example where “soft skills” are only soft when we don’t need them. When we do, these skills often are very hard. Again, here is the link.