Potential challenges in patient counselling

Ms Chen covers the remaining communication skills, before addressing the potential challenge. She also explains how to provide counselling to certain patient groups.

Key points

Essential communication skills:

• Avoid leading questions

• Moderate silence

• Avoid “why”

• Notice nonverbal cues

The pharmacist faces many challenges in providing patient counselling, such as:

• High workload

• Lack of privacy setting

• Language barriers

• Lack of effective communication skills

When counseling terminally ill patients, focus on palliative care and pain relief.

When counselling patients with incurable but treatable conditions, focus on building a pharmacist-patient relationship through the pharmacotherapy management counseling session.

When counselling geriatric patients, it is important to cater to potential limitations and disabilities, such as hearing loss or vision impairment. Identify patient-specific barriers and implement strategies to overcome them.

When counselling angry patients, pharmacists should unveil the core problem behind strong emotions.

TVGH strategies:

The medication consultation and education services system provides patients and medical staff a platform to ask medication-related questions online. It is reserved for TVGH patients because it is difficult to address questions without access to medical records. Requestors must have their name, gender, relation to patients, and contact details. To limit the question to medication-related problems, requestors must include a specific drug name in their question.

Share and learn:

Have you received communication skills training before?

Which patient groups do you think are difficult to counsel? How so?