Communication Skills for Clinicians
Looking for a simple way to strengthen your relationships with patients, enhance their ability to tolerate treatment, reduce your risk of litigation, and increase your job satisfaction? Improving communication is the key, and it’s especially important in palliative care.
Poor communication within the healthcare team, and between providers and patients, can lead to unnecessary hospital readmissions, costly malpractice suits, and even patient deaths, multiple studies have shown. But we’re not born with great communication skills—they must be learned, practiced, and expanded.
Communication Skills for Clinicians is a series of courses designed to increase clarity, empathy, and understanding in your conversations with patients and other members of the healthcare team.
Course Overviews |
Sharing Serious News
Date: Register anytime
Location: Online
This curriculum delivers proven techniques for effectively and compassionately communicating with patients and families in what could be the most difficult conversation of their lives: a life-limiting diagnosis, a treatment failure, or death. Whether you’re new or experienced in palliative care, this course will increase your skills and confidence.
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Communication Strategies for Shared and Informed Decision Making
Date: Register anytime
Location: Online
Palliative care is person-centered care, a model that requires patients and families to understand a difficult diagnosis, articulate their wishes, and participate in informed decision making that supports their goals of care. This course gives clinicians the communication tools necessary to convey and elicit critical information needed to best support patients on their journey through serious illness.
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Consultation Skills and Interprofessional Communication (coming soon)
Communication and collaboration among healthcare professionals and the interdisciplinary team is especially important in palliative care. This course delivers strategies to strengthen relationships among the team, referring physicians, care coordinators and other professionals, to improve patient outcomes.
About the Course Authors:
Kathleen A. Bonvicini, MPH, EdD, is the Chief Executive Officer at the Institute for Healthcare Communication (IHC), a nonprofit organization based in New Haven, CT, that has been designing and implementing skill-based communication training to health professionals since 1989.
Barbara Andrews, MPPM, MPH, has been the Director of Grants and Projects with the Institute for Healthcare Communication (IHC) since 2011. She brings extensive experience in grant seeking and management, health policy, business research, and program development and management.