How to Teach Medical Students to Break Bad News
Medical students must study, to the point of mastery, a wealth of information, procedures, practices and skills. On a daily basis, med students and residents help physicians to manage the patient load. The successful medical student masters coursework, yes, but also provides services with care and is able to communicate clearly, even in the most difficult of circumstances. One of the key communication skills a medical student must have command of is the ability to break bad news to their patients.
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Instructions
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Teach through curriculum. Medical students' curriculum must be built around the framework of becoming skilled in terminology, technology and techniques specific to their chosen fields of interest. Understanding that students will also be called upon, at some point in their careers, to break bad news to patients, you must also interweave the curriculum with courses that develop solid communication skills.
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Teach through communication. In many, if not most, instances, students will learn what they see practiced to a greater degree and more convincingly than what they read or hear about being practiced. Instructors of medical students must themselves be skilled communicators. As medical students witness instructors actual practicing the delicate sincerity with which bad news must be delivered, they will become stronger and more competent in doing so as well. This form of modeling will expedite a student's mastery.
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Teach through compassion. Compassion is a hard thing to teach. It is most likely even harder to teach to a medical student who is being taught to comprehend and treat illness without actually experiencing it. This can lead to the type of impersonal and unsympathetic interactions that often plague doctor/patient relationships. In one instance, this serves as protection for the medical student and the professional alike who, on a daily basis, have to deal with more life-or-death scenarios than others may see in a lifetime. In another instance, it can make the challenging charge of having to break bad news to a patient even more challenging, and could prove catastrophic.
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Teach students to tap into their own reservoirs of the compassion they have developed through other life experiences (even if the specifics are unrelated) to develop a warm and sympathetic approach to communicating news that will inevitably bring heartache to the patient. The news may not be either good or changeable, but the delivery of the news could have a psychological influence on the patient's ability and willingness to endure, and succeed in, other treatments, if prescribed.
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