About This Course

If you work in healthcare, you and your colleagues live in a world of specialized language. When dealing with patients, the job of the communicator is to speak plainly and connect with what the listener already knows.

Research shows that clear communication matters:

• Nearly 2,000 patient deaths and $1.7 billion in malpractice costs in a 5-year period are attributed to miscommunication
• Communication errors are the root cause of over 70 percent of serious adverse health outcomes in hospitals
• Two out of every three patients are discharged from the hospital without even knowing their diagnosis
• In over 60 percent of cases, patients misunderstood directions after a visit to their doctor’s office

In this course we address our own communication skills to help with some of these issues.

We’ll analyze the true story of a cancer patient and learn the different ways her doctors communicated in a difficult situation. Through recorded interviews, the patient reveals how these interactions affected her mentally and emotionally, offering a rich, first-person perspective of thoughts and feelings after a patient leaves the clinic.

Using lessons drawn from journalism, you’ll learn the proper way to structure a conversation so the patient learns the information that is most important to them. You’ll begin to consider questions like “What does she already know? What does she want to know? If I don’t know these things, how do I ask questions to get to this information?”