Whilst on an elective placement, my communication skills were tested when I was required to facilitate the return of functional mobility to a teenage girl post burn injury. My skills were required not only to achieve the functional outcome of mobilizing my patient but to provide motivation and education in order to achieve my goal.
Due to poor pain tolerance, anxiety and poor coping strategies my patient was very reluctant to get out of bed to shower and toilet herself, let alone walk up and down the corridor and facilitate circulation and healing. Due to her age and anxiety of the unknown I found that education would play a vital role in my first interaction with her. By explaining to her the process of burns and their stages of healing, the importance of early mobilisation to reduce the risk of contracture and later functional limitations and allowing her time to process and ask questions placed her at ease. The next step was to provide some ‘orientation’ to what my role as a physiotherapist was, the expectations for daily treatment (what time, for how long) and exercises (bike, walking, squats etc) and the gym set up, reinforced to her what would be expected in terms of time and activities. I feel that this communication with her built up a good rapport and trust. This further led to some distraction methods of my ability to copy her words in a joking manner when correcting her “waddling like a duck”. If I hadn’t established a good bond with her through my communication and interpersonal skills, I would not have been able to adopt some of the treatment techniques and language used. The rapport built during that initial stage allowed me to gain her trust and compliance with my exercise program and resulted in successful mobilization and gait correction.
After this experience it reinforced that time spent with a patient providing education in some situations is more beneficial than our treatment itself as it can provide further long-term benefits via the patients compliance. Spending time building rapport with a patient is important and shouldn’t be overlooked.
2 comments:
I think that people often underestimate the importance of patient rapport and understanding. If a patient can understand why they need to be doing what you are telling them to do it will make compliance far greater than if they had no reasoning behind the exercises. I too have learnt this from virtually evey single one of my pracs!
It just further concludes how broad a role a physiotherapist has in any situatuion. Not only are we required to mobilize and treat, the psychological issues we have to face and deal with are equally and sometimes even more important. Fear and avoidance of a situation could prove more of a long term issue than the pathology itself!
Post a Comment