Communication Skills

It is quite important that the hospital personnel communicate with the patients and their relatives and visitors well. A patient gets partly cured (the functional component of the illness) by the hope given by the doctor. The accompanying people are tense and they get assured by people at the hospital if they speak well. Unfortunately they are understaffed, overworked, and dissatisfied due to partial or total lack of equipment, medicines, consumables and investigative facilities. They are stressed and they tend to consider the patients as the source of the stress. Then they don't communicate with them well, which is the beginning of a number of unhappy situations which sometimes lead to violence on the part of the patients' relatives and friends, assaulting hospital personnel and damaging hospital property. Our institute conducted a series of workshops for all hospital personnel, educating them on communication skills. Actually they were didactic lectures rather than workshops, with a minor role-play in between lasting for a couple of minutes. They were good and hopefully they achieved what they were expected to achieve. There was a problem however. They had pooled doctors, nurses, laboratory personnel and servants together. Considering the job descriptions and level of intellect and comprehension of the different people, the course content was not appropriate for everyone at any given time, or in other words, it was appropriate for some when it was not so for some others. They must have their reasons for such an arrangement, which I am not privy to. The workshops are over. But I thought of them today when I heard a woman shouting “Bhimabai, Bhimabai, come here. How many times do I have to call you, eh?” at the top of her voice, and in a tone that indicated Bhimabai (name changed to protect her identity) was a nobody but was being offered treatment as a favor she did not deserve. I was sitting in the doctors' room next to the OT and could clearly hear everything. So I went out and checked who was shouting at Bhimabai. It was an anesthetist. I asked her if it was her who was asking for Bhimabai. She said it was. Since I have no control over the anesthetists, I turned away and went back to my work. I used to talk to senior anesthetists in past when some such thing required to be corrected. I stopped that when I realized it did not achieve anything. Perhaps the anesthetist was unable to attend that workshop. God help her in her practice outside this hospital if she continues to communicate with her patients in this manner.