3 Ways to Improve Your Clinical Communication

By Jimmy McKay, PT, DPT

Director of Communications

Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw famously said, “The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

This quote from Shaw highlights that there are many components in sharing information that needs to be taken into consideration when communicating. Strengthening your ability to communicate with patients, colleagues, or with people in your personal life is much like strengthening a muscle. If you ignore it, it will atrophy. If you flex it often you will strengthen it. My career has a mix of communications and physical therapy backgrounds. There are many parallels between patient care and communications. It’s important to remember to flex your communications muscles while working directly with patients, communicating with colleagues, or sharing knowledge on a large stage, such as an in-service, conference, or webinar.

Here are three basic communication fundamentals of communication that can be used to your advantage as a clinician.

Clinical Communication Starts with Self-Reflection

All good clinical encounters should begin with a thorough evaluation. Self-reflection is a great exercise to evaluate where we are and what we can work on. Before we start setting goals to achieve we need to know where we are and that begins with a self-reflection.

Reflections are frequently prompted in graduate education but often resisted by graduate students (myself included). Reflection is a great way to take what you have experienced in both positive and negative encounters and learn from them.

Knowing more about yourself will allow you to focus on your current strengths and weaknesses. In a reflection on your communication skills this means you’ll begin to know more about:

• What types of messages you are currently comfortable and effective at sharing.
• What information do you need to brush up on before you begin attempting to share it?
• What types of delivery methods play to your strengths?

We typically work on things that we are most comfortable with and tend to skip over the ones that give us difficulty. Self-reflection lets us first know where we stand and that’s why it’s first on my list.

As a clinician, knowing your strengths and weaknesses also highlights positives and can help give you a reminder of the value you can bring. Often we minimize the importance of the knowledge we have to offer those that we encounter. A self-reflection is a great way to do a review and give us a boost of confidence in the areas that we’re already skilled in.

Practice Exercise:

“The grunt test” is a self-reflection technique to use frequently to make sure messages you’re sharing are clear. The test is called the “grunt” test because it involves answering three questions where the answers need to be so clear, that even a caveman could “grunt” the answers.

Keep in mind that you’re answering these questions on behalf of the audience you’re communicating with

The Grunt Test

1. What do you do?
2. How does it make my life better?
3. What do I need to do to get it?

Your audiences are knowingly or unknowingly already answering these questions each time they interact with you, a product they might want to buy, or a service they are considering using. For someone to want to engage they need to be able to clearly and concisely “grunt” the answers to themselves to want to interact with you. Failure to clearly communicate will cause confusion, and confusion is the opposite of communication.

Reviewing the grunt test frequently with different audiences that you communicate with, will lead to being more clear about what you can bring to an encounter and improve the clarity of your messages.

Clinicians Have to Know Their Audience

After you look inward at what value you can bring, the next step is to look outward and see who you can help with your knowledge.

As a clinician knowing your audience will help you better prepare your message for your audience. Here is a good exercise to use to help focus your message.

Practice Exercise:

Ask yourself:

1. What does this audience need?
2. What do I know that could help them?
3. In what ways are they most likely to want to receive this information?

Example

Audience: Older adults that bowl.

1. What does this audience need?
   Information to improve or maintain their balance as they age.
2. What do I know that could help them?
   A single-legged balance exercise program
3. In what ways are they most likely to want to receive this information?
   An easy to read exercise handout that a clinician has reviewed with them at their preferred pace.

Things to keep in mind:

“Everyone” likely isn’t going to be your audience. Everyone is just too large of a group to try and communicate with effectively. This is why focusing on smaller more niche audiences, and what different things you can give to them are a more effective way to communicate. An example of a niche audience would be older adults who bowl or men over 75 who love to cycle.

You can, and should, have more than one audience. With this in mind realize that what you will communicate, how you will communicate, and why you are communicating will all depend on which one of these audiences you are trying to share a message with.

Craft Your Message

Now that you (the sender) know what information you have that is valuable for an audience (the receiver) the next step is to thoughtfully craft your message so that is it easily understood. An example of skilled message crafting can be found in Hollywood.

There is a message called a logline that movie producers will use to explain a film that they would like to create. They first need to get others involved in the project and to do that they create a logline, a short one or two-sentence summary of a film that gives an overview of what the movie is about as well as some details that will grab the audience’s attention.

Exercise:

Can you name these famous Hollywood films from their FilmDaily loglines? (answers below)

1. A Las Vegas-set comedy centered around three groomsmen who lose their about-to-be-wed buddy during their drunken misadventures then must retrace their steps in order to find him.
2. The aging patriarch of an organized crime dynasty transfers control of his clandestine empire to his reluctant son.
3. A computer hacker learns from mysterious rebels about the true nature of his reality and his role in the war against its controllers.
4. A lion cub who is a future king searches for his identity. His eagerness to please others and penchant for testing his boundaries sometimes gets him into trouble.

Answers:

1. The Hangover
2. The Godfather
3. The Matrix
4. The Lion King

While this process may look easy when you see the final product in print it can be difficult at first. We often have so much information to share that we don’t know where to begin. This can lead to communicating information in a way that leaves the audience confused.

Exercise:
Craft your logline

1. Select a piece of information that you have as a clinician.
   Example: How to set up a home environment to decrease the likelihood of a fall for an older adult.
2. Pick an audience you’d like to communicate that information with.
   Example: An adult whose parent is one of your current patients.
3. Craft a message that will clearly and concisely share your information, that won’t overwhelm or confuse them.
   Example: There are a few things that I see in your parent’s home that can cause a fall. Things like throw rugs or exposed power cords can be potential causes of falls. I’d love to be able to show you things we can do together to reduce the likely hood of your parent falling in their home, is this something you’d be open to?

Remember that your audience has limited time and focus to receive all of your information at once. To combat this, a carefully crafted message, delivered to the right audience in the right way will set you up for success as a clinician.

This process does take time and effort but when done correctly it can greatly improve your communication skill and ultimately help the people that matter most, our patients.