Managing Difficult Patient Encounters: Simulation Design, Findings, and Call to Action

Managing Difficult Encounters: Understanding Physician, Patient, and Situational Factors <FEFF>[Query: Should Difficult Patient Encounters be changed to Difficult Clinical Encounters for consistency with the text?]

D ifficult encounters are estimated to represent 15 to 30 percent of family physician visits. Factors contributing to these difficult clinical encounters may be related to the physician, patient, situation, or a combination. Physicians can recognize these visits as challenging by acknowledging their feelings of angst or helplessness generated during the conversation. These encounters are also c...

Call to action: aggressively managing lipid levels.

In this issue of The Whole Patient, the articles by these presenters attest to our awareness of the need to be more aggressive in our treatment plans and stress comprehensive care and the knowledge that the Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) can improve outcomes. Since May 2002, we have been attuned to a new “call to action” for aggressive management of lipid levels and treatment of dyslipide...

Patient navigation: a call to action.

How respected family physicians manage difficult patient encounters.

BACKGROUND Nearly all family physicians have patients that engender a sense of frustration or dislike, often described as "difficult." Most research in this area focuses on describing these patients and their physicians, not management or coping. OBJECTIVE To describe how respected family physicians identify, manage, and cope with difficult patient encounters. METHODS Qualitative semi-struc...

Managing chronic hepatitis C in the difficult-to-treat patient

Patients with chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection and disease-related complications - among them cirrhosis and liver failure - pose a particular management challenge. Some of these patients may fail to respond to current therapy (non-responders), and some are affected so severely that treatment puts them at an unacceptable risk for complications. Treatment with pegylated interferon (peg-I...