Communication is a clinical skill (Part 5)

Inclusion of the communication skills in everyday practice requires us to move beyond what we do anyway to a higher level of intention in the way that we interact with clients and one another. These more effective consultations and interactions also lead to improved outcomes of care including improved client, vet practitioner, staff member satisfaction, increased understanding and recall by clients, increased adherence and practice success. Let’s turn our attention to two useful techniques for communicating during consultations: the “shot-put” approach and the “Frisbee” approach.

Shot-put or Frisbee approach

All of our attempts to improve communication can be reduced to two basic perspectives: the Shot-put approach and the Frisbee approach (Figure 1). The shot-put defines communication simply as the well-conceived, well-delivered message or more affectionately referred to as the “Park and Bark”. Many of us have attended lectures over the years, some of which are not of the highest quality and some of the following have contributed to them being less desirable:

• The lecturer speaks solid for 50 minutes and is unwilling to take questions until the end
• The lecturer used jargon you cannot understand
• The lecturer loses you early on in his talk and you have trouble making sense of anything said thereafter
• You are given too much or too little information
• You are not sure what the key points are of the lecture
• You cannot recall much of anything that was said when you return to work and are asked to report on what you learned

In the practice of veterinary medicine and especially during times in the appointment when we are giving information we can apply our experience from the lecture described above to how our clients might be feeling. The impact of the lecture noted above is reminiscent of a shot-put approach to communicating. We can optimize information giving and move toward a “Frisbee” approach by using the following communication skills:

Effective communication is comprised of what you want to tell the client, the delivery of the content or information and persuasion – you prepare your message carefully, you heave it out there, and your job is done. “Telling” is central to this approach; feedback is nowhere in the picture. Part of the reason that this approach is so prevalent might have to do with the fact that communication training and/or modeling has focused on the shot-put for years. Only in the middle of the twentieth century did the focus begin to shift from one-way to interpersonal communication or more informally named the Frisbee approach. [...]