FIP YPG Project: Improving communication skills; the foundation of every care service
By Antria Pavlidou, Leonor Soares and Luciana Tofi (12/05/2022)
This project is an outcome of the FIP YPG mentorship program. It reflects the importance of adequate control of communication skills to optimize patients’ health results and quality of life.
There are different conflict situations that pharmacists may face with patients on a daily basis. Hence, communication skills are a very important factor for every pharmacist. This is why it is important for all healthcare professionals to manage these skills properly and learn how to be aware of and handle those situations. Some diverse examples can be:
- Problems with prescriptions like mistakes, lack of prescription, wrong prescription, and others.
- When a mistake is made by the pharmacy, we have to inform the patient.
- Patients’ lack of money to buy all the medicines they need.
- Different levels of understanding about different topics like reading, writing, use of cell phones, and lack of understanding on how to use complex medicine devices (inhalers, insulin pens, etc).
- When we have to interact with other healthcare professionals about problems with prescriptions like if there is a mistake or a change of medicine´s dose and the patient doesn’t remember, among others.
The importance of managing good communication skills is crucial for pharmacists and for healthcare professionals in general in order to give accurate care services. Improving communication skills as well as approaching the patient’s needs with daily actions like active listening and managing proper negotiating and conflict resolution skills is how health results can be improved. It is also crucial to enhance communication practices between healthcare professionals to encourage multidisciplinary work and teamwork in order to give better treatments to patients.
The main aim of this project is to foster the improvement of the pharmacist´s communication skills in service delivery through the development of a practical guide with tools to improve and learn to apply communication and negotiation skills based on the conflict situations previously identified that may present in community pharmacies along with different countries and in professional-patient relations in general.
