Healthcare Training Topics
Are your HCAHPS scores suffering and you’re not sure why? Are your employees not responding to your current communication training programs? Does it seem like your people are making the same communication mistakes time and again?
At Mouthpeace, we know communication in healthcare environments. Our team of award-winning Ph.D. instructors and physicians helps hospitals raise HCAHPS scores by improving the communication between patients and healthcare providers. We don’t come into your hospital with generic PowerPoint slides, a well-worn script, and a bucketful of clichés. Instead, we collaborate with you to understand what’s happening in your hospital, and then we completely customize a training program to solve the problems that you are actually experiencing.
Our approach to training is different. Not only do we provide training to deal with challenging situations that give everyone trouble, like communicating with difficult people, ethical decision making, and cross-cultural communication, but we also provide individualized coaching to find and eliminate bad communication habits. These habits matter because, unfortunately, just one bad habit can often cause a significant number of poor interactions with patients. In a few hours of one-on-one instruction, our expert instructors can identify and extinguish the most common bad communication habits. This combined approach results in more relevant training, better communication, and improved patient experiences.
Let us put together a custom training package for your healthcare organization. Please email us or call Mouthpeace toll-free at (800) 280-7785.
Don’t put your staff through training they don’t need.
Communication training programs that ignore the fact that most of your employees are already pretty good communicators are counterproductive because they send the message that your people aren’t doing a good job, which almost certainly isn’t the case. The key is to build on the existing strengths of your employees, and to prepare them for the difficult communication situations that healthcare professionals often face. Your employees will leave Mouthpeace communication training sessions with solutions to the actual problems they are experiencing, and with a reaffirmed belief that they are doing a good job.
Bad communication habits require individualized attention.
Most people who have trouble communicating with patients want to improve, but they don’t realize what is causing the problem in the first place. And no amount of group training can identify and eliminate bad communication habits, because habits vary dramatically from person to person. Group training is most effective for helping people add a behavior, like learning up a new tool, a technique, or a strategy. But when dealing with bad habits, it’s necessary to remove something. That’s why our approach works better. We help diagnose where the problems are coming from, we identify bad communication habits, and we eliminate those habits through individualized coaching. Once these repetitive communication errors are removed, patient-provider communication, patient satisfaction, and employee satisfaction usually improve dramatically. The elimination of one or two bad communication habits per person will increase HCAHPS scores more than any other intervention.
Four common categories of bad communication habits:
Bad listening habits, such as failing to incorporate new information into a conversation, frequently losing your place in a conversation, or repeating yourself too often can make it seem like you are not listening, and can degrade the quality of the conversation.
Habits that distract or confuse, like nonverbal expressions that don’t match words, overloading the patient with information, distracting body movements, or eccentric verbal tendencies (like excessive pausing between statements), can derail a conversation.
Bad questioning habits can make a conversation feel like an interrogation, and often cause people to either clam up, or to push back aggressively against your leading or loaded questions. Bad questions lead people to conclude that the questions are rigged against them, and can produce feelings of apprehension, anxiety, and mistrust.
Conversation-stopping habits like contradicting, responding with sweeping certainty, or criticizing, often cause people to abruptly end a conversation.