Effective Doctor Patient Communication: Building Bridges and Bridging Barriers

Effective doctor patient communication: building bridges and bridging barriers.

The headache history is discussed as a model for establishing effective doctor patient communication. A thorough knowledge regarding headache onset, course and current features provides a basis for diagnosis and management. The principles of acceptance, validation, empathy, respect and advocacy are explored.

Recognizing and adjusting to barriers in doctor-patient communication.

Barriers frequently develop in physician-patient encounters. If they go unrecognized, they can severely limit the therapeutic potential of the doctor-patient relationship. Because barriers are not always explicit, a strategy is presented for recognizing implicit signs such as verbal-nonverbal mismatch, cognitive dissonance, unexpected resistance, and physician discomfort. Once a potential barri...

Follow-Up Visits in Doctor-Patient Communication: The Vietnamese Case

In a “follow-up visit”, a patient seeks medical attention for an existing health problem. Using data from the Vietnamese public hospital system, we present a more nuanced analysis of follow-ups in health communication than the one currently available. To be specific, we discriminate between “same follow-ups”, in which the doctor is the same one as in the last visit, and “different follow-ups”, ...

Effective improvement of doctor-patient communication: a randomised controlled trial.

BACKGROUND Doctor-patient communication is an essential component of general practice. Improvement of GPs' communication patterns is an important target of training programmes. Available studies have so far failed to provide conclusive evidence of the effectiveness of educational interventions to improve doctor-patient communication. AIM To examine the effectiveness of a learner-centred appro...

Effective doctor-patient communication--a hit or a myth?