During the medical interview, patients’ strong emotions tend to elicit strong emotions in their clinicians. Depending on clinicians’ skill and self-awareness, those emotions can lead to productive exploration of important clinical issues, or they can threaten therapeutic relationships. This module…
Closing an interview is a complex endeavor, and your success depends both on your skillful approach to preceding interview segments and the skills you employ in the closing moments. The closure of any patient encounter includes specific behaviors and interactions…
Reaching agreement is a complex process that includes identifying the nature of the problem, defining preferred roles and involvement in decision making, agreeing on goals, and gathering and sharing biomedical and psychosocial information. Participants in this process must address feelings,…
Clinicians can share information and build collaborative relationships by using specific communication strategies. Use ASK-TELL-ASK to stay in dialogue and to assess and respond to patients’ information needs and emotions. Celebrate and support patients’ successes. These efforts will help meet…
You greatly improve your patients’ outcomes when you jointly construct the story of the illness, weaving the patient’s elaboration of the biomedical and psychosocial threads together with your own hypotheses. The primary goals of information gathering are to elicit biomedical…
You greatly improve your patients’ outcomes when you jointly construct the story of the illness, weaving the patient’s elaboration of the biomedical and psychosocial threads together with your own hypotheses. This module explores the primary goals of information gathering, which…
Patients usually present to primary care offices with an average of three concerns. Elicitation of all of the patient’s symptoms and concerns in the ambulatory and in-patient setting requires little additional time and diminishes the likelihood of late arising concerns…
A positive doctor-patient relationship is the key to medical care. Substantial evidence indicates that a relationship of trust and respect promotes better adherence to treatment recommendations, better physical and emotional outcomes and the disclosure of patients’ hidden concerns. Furthermore, the…
In this module we introduce the medical interview and review important background concepts. We describe the process of obtaining and communicating a complete history through integration of doctor-centered and patient-centered approaches to obtaining information, and then synthesizing the information into…
Medical education and the medical profession are stressful endeavors, with high rates of burnout and mental health problems, including substance abuse. We will be satisfied and effective clinicians only if we find healthy methods for coping with stress. We cannot…
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