Introduction to Communications

I’m Amos Bailey, director of the Master’s of Science in Palliative Care and Graduate Interprofessional Palliative Care Certificate programs here at the University of Colorado Anschutz medical campus.

In this activity, you will learn the effective communication skills necessary to work with patients with serious illness and their family caregivers. In the early 1990s, I worked as a medical oncologist and HIV/AIDS the primary care provider. Through this work, I realized how much my patients and their families benefited from the support of hospice care. Early on in my career, I encountered the work of Walter Baile and others and was struck by how important formal education, training, and communication could be. Over the next few years, I reviewed Dr. Baile’s work and applied the lessons to my own practice, not just in hospice work, but in all my patient interactions throughout their illness. You will hear more about Dr. Baile’s works when we study the SPIKES model later in the week. I am still a student. In the last 30 years, palliative care providers in all disciplines, social work, chaplains, physicians, have studied communications and healthcare and developed a variety of programs and projects to teach better communication skills. We encourage you to learn from our basic communication techniques, but many of you may want to seek more advanced communication training in the future.