Hi everyone, hope everyone is enjoying their placement so far. I am currently doing my musculo placement. All of my previous placements have been on inpatient wards and switching to an outpatient ward have been quite challenging. Not only is there a lot more administration stuff to take care of, but you are constantly under pressure to finish on time. If you are not done on time, it’s too bad because your next patient is in the waiting room. It has not been a problem thus far but I feel as though when I am doing my initial assessments, it seem so robotic. In an inpatient setting, you are able to read their medical records prior to seeing them and the initial assessment questions are to clarify specific details. It seem so much easier to build patient rapport with an inpatient than it is in an outpatient setting. In an outpatient setting you are given very little information and sometimes just the patient’s name. Our supervisor told us to inform our patients that we will be going through an initial assessment and will have to go through the questions in a specific order so please let us ask the questions and wait till the end to inform us of any missed information. As a student it’s good because it helps us stay focused and get all the information but it seems so formal and robotic.
A lovely elderly woman came into our clinic as a new referral. From the beginning you can tell that she was very chatty and was someone that would need constant reminder to stay on track. When you ask someone how the incident occurred and they begin with an exhaustive description of their role in an elder’s association, you know it’ll be a long assessment. I know you have to keep your patients on track and learn the fine art of cutting them off but it felt like I had to do that for every question. Maybe it’s the fact that we have to write everything down immediately but I’m afraid that I’m sacrificing patient rapport with getting all the details down. It feels like I’m conducting an interview more than anything else.
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HI sub29,
i had a similiar chatting patient during my final assessment in MS OP and one thing i learnt from that was the importance of structuring your questions to such patients.
Basically, it is to ask qns that require a yes or no answer.Not the easiest thing for us to do when all we have on our minds is to make sure we hv got every detail pt has shared with us. But i am sure with practice, we will get better at it.
How i build patient rapport is through my body language and taking note of little things they tell us that may not be relevant to their condition and asking them abt it during the next session. So they are aware that i have been listening.
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