Talk and Listen

Effective communication can benefit the patient by reducing stress, improving adherence to medication and increasing the ability to remember information correctly after an office visit. It can also lead to higher job satisfaction for health care providers and fewer medical malpractice lawsuits.

• Be an active, interested listener
• Sit down and face your patient when having a conversation
• Talk to your patients in ways they can understand
  • Use everyday, plain language
  • If you have to use a medical term, define it
  • Be concrete, i.e. “Take your pill with breakfast, lunch and dinner,” rather than, “Take your pill three times a day.”
  • Put numbers in context, i.e. “one out of 10 people” instead of “10% of the population” or “your bad cholesterol is 160, that is a higher than we want. Let’s try to get it down to below 100.”
  • Use metaphors to make the information more familiar, i.e. “blood going through a vein is like water moving through a hose.”
• Ask open-ended questions, using “what” or “how,” i.e. “What are your symptoms?” not “Do you have symptoms?”
• Use visual aids – draw a picture, grab a pamphlet or use a model
• If the patient looks confused, he or she probably is. Stop and address that