Continuing Medical Education for Physicians:
Skill Training to Enhance the
Physician Patient Relationship

By providing skill training to enhance the physician patient relationship and the essential communication skills and protocols that receive so little attention in most medical school curricula, you will engage physicians in advancing your organization’s patient experience or service excellence strategy.

Powerful Services for Physicians by Wendy Leebov and Associates
Wendy Leebov and Associates provides briefings and grand rounds presentations to help physicians embrace the essential role they play in creating a quality patient experience.

Two Objectives:

  • Make the research-based case for focusing on communication and interpersonal skills to optimize patient satisfaction, clinical outcomes, business results, and physician job satisfaction
  • Define and demonstrate concrete communication skills that build relationships with patients and families and contribute to a quality patient experience
Briefing 1: Best Practices in Everyday Encounters
Key words and behaviors at key times help to build rapport and communication with patients and families. This briefing focuses on pivotal interactions and how physicians can impress patients and families with their care and concern during those everyday interactions.
  • Quick review of the case for moving from good to GREAT in patient and family satisfaction
  • The survey questions used to monitor patient/family perceptions of physician performance
  • The concrete physician behaviors and skills that create a healing environment and build positive relationships with patients/families: Best practices related to the pivotal skill of presence and confidence-building greetings, handoffs, and goodbyes

Briefing 2: Caring Communication Skills: Speaking the Language of Caring and Emotional Support
To patients and families, the physician-patient relationship is supremely important. Patients and families want to feel personally connected to their physician. They also want to feel secure that their physician cares about them as an individual and is there for them when the going gets tough. This briefing strengthens the physician’s ability to communicate with empathy and caring, providing the tangible emotional support that fosters patient engagement, adherence and satisfaction.
  • How to use the Heart-Head-Heart Communication Model to balance cognitive and affective communication
  • The Seven Skills That Communicate Caring -- the specific language and nonverbal behaviors that make your personal caring felt and demonstrate emotional support to patients and families
  • The skills applied to everyday situations

Briefing 3: Dealing with Difficult Situations
Physicians are faced with families who behave in ways that are sometimes irritating, demanding, frustrating, and/or stressful. In the face of unsettling behavior, impressive professional behavior requires empathy, direct and tactful communication, and resourcefulness. This program briefs physicians on win-win communication skills valuable in handling difficult situations with patients and families.
  • Preventing difficult interactions by adjusting expectations
  • The Heart-Head-Heart Communication Model: Specific ways to make your caring palpable to patients and families
  • How to use the Caring Broken Record to handle anger, complaints and resistance when you need to hold your ground and want to do so caringly

Briefing 4: Hard Conversations
Physicians are stressed and challenged by the need to hold hard conversations with patients, families and coworkers. This briefing presents a powerful, concrete model for holding a hard conversation that couches very difficult messages in the context of strongly felt caring and emotional support. The results: Improved cooperation and adherence by patients, enhanced patient satisfaction and less stress for the physician.
  • The Hard Conversations Model: Step-by-step
  • Examples with patients, family members and coworkers
  • Discussion of how to apply the model in case situations

Please contact us to discuss your training needs and priorities.

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