Synopsis: Patients and their families seek and highly value honest, complete, timely and well-coordinated communication with their health care providers. Indeed, good communication is associated with better treatment adherence, improved patient outcomes, heightened family and provider satisfaction, fewer medication errors, and reduced litigation risk. Yet, there is no shortage of challenging conversations in health care. Multiple circumstances can converge to amplify conversational difficulty and complexity- further stressing clinicians who often feel unprepared and unskilled in this area of practice. This presentation will explore common challenges clinicians face including lack of previously established relationships, misaligned surgical or treatment expectations, language and cultural misunderstandings, heightened emotionality, time pressures, family-staff conflict, and fractured teamwork. Impediments to good communication and relationships will be highlighted. Drawing on the curricula and lessons of the Program to Enhance Relational and Communication Skills (PERCS), the presentation will offer helpful, practical strategies to steady and guide practitioners faced with challenging conversations. Participants will learn about making the most of first clinical encounters, trust-building strategies, recognizing and managing emotions, person-first language, word choice and use of visuals to enhance communication, and prioritizing concerns and optimizing precious time. Essential recovery/repair approaches will be reviewed when conversations are strained and going poorly, or when things go wrong. Participants will come away with a fuller, more refined toolbox of communication and relational skills to optimize their everyday conversations and be better equipped to avoid potential pitfalls, mistakes and errors.

Speaker: Elaine C. Meyer, Ph.D., R.N. is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Institute for Professionalism and Ethical Practice at Boston Children’s Hospital. A psychiatric nurse and clinical psychologist by training, she has worked over twenty years in neonatal and paediatric critical care settings. Her research and scholarship have focused on identifying parental perspectives and priorities for care at end of life, psychosocial models of care delivery, spirituality, interprofessional learning, and simulation-based learning devoted to difficult healthcare conversations and the ethics of everyday clinical care. She has published over 75 peer-reviewed articles and has presented widely nationally and internationally.