Summary of Effective Interview Techniques

Summary of Effective Interview Techniques Name Institution Due Date Abstract Today, the world experiences a lot of technological innovations which often overshadow what makes us human as well as what has been working for a long time. Everything is changing, and all fields are greatly affected including the medical field. Currently, listening to patients has been relegated as more attention is paid to laboratory tests and imaging studies. Making connections or developing relationships with patients is slowly becoming secondary as people are focusing more on making hospitalizations shorter. Physicians are focusing more on enhancing their careers instead of focusing on improving their communication skills to help promote physician-patient relationships. Sir William Osler once said that “the good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.” This statement simply means that the approach towards enhancing treatment procedures could be flawed if physicians keep ignoring the importance of enhancing their relationship with their patients. Improving or growing this relationship is greatly dependent on communication. Lappen (2011) notes that “the emerging body of literature on quality and safety in medical care has demonstrated an unequivocal benefit of good communication on improved outcomes and clear associations of communication deficiencies with medical error and negative patient experiences.” Summary of Effective Interview Techniques When it comes to collecting a patient’s health history, communication plays a significant role. The success or failure of an interview is greatly dependent on the kind of communication the physician and patient end up having. Different models to help enhance physician-patient communication have been developed. However, the underlying fact is that “quality of medical care requires a combination of comprehensive scientific knowledge and sophisticated communication skills” (Lappen, 2011). Communication is thus essential. Summarize effective interview techniques for collecting a patient’s health history Initially, the clinician or physician-centered approach to interviewing was considered effective because it was direct. Lappen notes that in their careers, “clinicians perform, on average, over 200,000 interviews during their career.” He continues to note that “obtaining a history and performing the patient interview is the principal skill in medicine and represents the primary vehicle for electing relevant personal or symptom information about patients” (2011). Interviewing is indeed effective in gathering clinical data, and it also forms the basis for a physician-patient relationship. With regards to the physician-centered approach, the goal of conducting an interview was to understand the symptoms of the patient. However, this approach as Lappen notes “fails to incorporate other psychological or social factors that may be primary determinants of health for patients.” The physician assumes the leader’s role in this kind of interview and focuses solely on making the right diagnosis. The questions here are close-ended, and patients are not allowed to express any of their personal concerns. While following this approach, Beckman and Fran...