[Ebooks] Communication for Doctors

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Communication for Doctors: How to Improve Patient Care and Minimize Legal Risks

Description:
What Makes a Good Health Care System? examines the various assumptions that underpin the different views of what makes a good health care system. The national systems in the UK, Australia and Canada are thoroughly examined. Each country has a different view of what a good health care system is trying to achieve, and the book elucidates these by highlighting key policy documents and comments from key stakeholders. Case studies emphasise the diverse needs and expectations of individuals, examining and comparing concepts of health needs, quality as a measure of ‘good-ness’ and the various ideas on Gold Standards. This book will be valuable reading for all healthcare managers and clinicians with management responsibilities, as well as policy makers and shapers and all those with a general interest in health.

Preface
So said the great clinician Sir William Osler in the early part of the last century. And even if that piece of advice was offered tongue in cheek, today’s physicians would quickly face opprobrium – if not a lawsuit – if they followed it.

As a matter of fact, litigation in medicine often has more to do with breakdown in communication than with clinical malfeasance. As Levinson et al. point out in the Journal of the American Medical Association (277 (7): 553): “Significant differences in communication behaviors of no-claims and claims physicians were identified in primary care physicians.” General internists and family doctors who spend more time with patients were more likely, according to the article, to educate them, to elicit information and to listen to it, and were less likely to face litigation.

And Maguire and Pitkeathly noted in the British Medical Journal (325: 697-700) that “good doctors communicate effectively with patients – they identify patients’ problems more accurately, and patients are more satisfied with the care they receive.” Moreover, the authors noted, doctors with good communication skills also have greater job satisfaction and less work stress.

It was with these kinds of thoughts in mind that I wrote Paging Doctors, a book largely about communication issues in healthcare – speaking, writing, reading, listening – and about the use, and misuse, of language in medicine. Out of that book came a newsletter, Medical Practice Communicator, which for eight years was sponsored by an enlightened medical malpractice insurance company that made it available to its 25 000 insured physicians.

While most of the pieces collected here are from that newsletter, some, especially the interview with Norman Cousins and the article on medicine and the English language, had an earlier life in Paging Doctors … and an even prior iteration in the pages of the Canadian Medical Association Journal, for which I wrote some 200 articles, editorials, reviews and interviews.

The medical director of that company, Dr Robert Pendrak, was the visionary who saw that physicians who communicate effectively are less likely to be sued. Since this book, Communication for Doctors, contains many of the articles that appeared in Medical Practice Communicator, I should like also to acknowledge here the newsletter’s vigilant and talented copy-editor and proofreader, Edith Schwager, author of Medical English Usage and Abusage, and its equally rigorous medical editor, Dr John Gartland, author of Medical Writing and Communicating. Further, I am most grateful for the contributions made by readability consultant, Mark Hochhauser; lawyers Joan Roediger and James Saxton; former scientific editor of the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Dr Peter Morgan; computer and information technology expert, Jonathan Coopersmith; Susan Keane Baker, author of Managing Patient Expectations; Albert Mehl, pediatrician; Julia Schopick, public relations consultant; and Peter Ubel, Director, Health Care Decisions

Program – all of whose work appears, with their permission, in the following pages. Further thanks are due to production editor, Norman Kline, for scanning and pulling together the 66 titles that make up Communication for Doctors, and to my wife, Shelly Wolf, for her project management skills, sage counsel, and unfailing support and encouragement.

All of us associated with Medical Practice Communicator felt that many of its articles were too valuable to the broader international community of medical practitioners to be allowed simply to float into the ether. That is why we have collected the best of them here – to help doctors become not only better communicators, but better doctors.


Summary
Title: Communication for Doctors: How to Improve Patient Care and Minimize Legal Risks
Author: David Woods
Publisher:CRC Press
Year: 2023
Edition: – Edition
Language: English
Pages: 138
Ebook: PDF
File size: 5 MB
ISBN Number: 9781857758955, 9781003420088
CBID: CBM334

Communication for Doctors: How to Improve Patient Care and Minimize Legal Risks