Communication Rx: Transforming Healthcare Through Relationship-Centered Communication

CHAPTER 6

Challenging Conversations with Patients

In Chapters 3–5 we introduced the fundamental communication skills that foster effective connections and relationship-centered care. Participants in our courses often say that they imagine the skills will be effective with patients that they get along with, but worry that the skills will fall short with the patients who are bringing their experience scores down. Clinicians seem most distressed when they have to break bad news, manage high levels of emotion such as anger or mistrust, and address expectations they can’t satisfy. In this chapter, we offer suggestions for how to apply the fundamental skills in the context of these challenging encounters.

All of these situations involve problems that ...