During healthcare education, a lot of focus is placed on subjects like pharmacology, pathology, and therapeutics. These are essential for understanding disease and treatment.
But in real clinical situations, patient behavior also plays a major role. Some patients forget doses, some fear side effects, and others avoid treatment because of anxiety or misinformation.
This made me think that understanding patient psychology and communication may also be an important clinical skill, especially for improving medication adherence and patient trust.
Knowing the medicine is important — but understanding the patient may be equally important.
Do you think patient psychology and communication skills should receive more attention in healthcare education?
MBH/PS
3 Likes
Yes, that’s an interesting uptake on patient care. From my experience, the practitioners who offer a patient ear to their patients, are trusted more. When it comes to patient care psychology indeed plays a major role. Sometimes, it’s more about counselling than treatment itself. More emphasis should be laid on the importance of understanding basic psychology when treating patients to help patients feel understood, and cared for.
Big yes, understanding patient psychology is much more important to give them accurate medications that is why now we need councillor more than medicine .
Understanding patient psychology will help to give better treatment to the patient. By knowing what the patient thinks and how they react when they recive a medication will be very much helpful to provide appropriate treatment.
Yes, both patient psychology and communication skills deserve far more attention in healthcare education. Being doctors we should never forget that empathy is not just a verbal say we need to practice it daily on each patient that we treat. The knowledge that we gain during our academic and clinical training alone is not enough. A successful clinician must also be a compassionate listener and should silently observe the patients psychology to improve the treatment outcomes.
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Yes, absolutely. During earlier clinical posting days , every student gets scared and hesitate to confront patients. It is better if there is prior lessons for patient psychology. Plus courses or lesson like these will be useful for personality development.
AN ABSOLUTE YESto this concept.
I totally agree with the fact that beside having sharp and applicable knowledge of the medicines, test , procedures and all; a Healthcare professional must consider the psychology of the patient that is being dealed with .
In my perspective
psychology
Human behavioral psychology
Are few subjects that should be mandatory in every graduation course
Be that a fashion designing curriculum or a hard core software engineering is it will lead to -
Better work life balance
Better work environment
Increased self awareness
Increased productivity
Less no. of assults/ abuse / mistreatment of any kind ( even backbiting) in the work environment
It’s not just the Healthcare section
Engineering
Biotechnology
Agriculture
Food
Beauty
Corporates
Business
Arts
This opinion stands out in each and every field that a human brain can imagine of..
Absolutely!! i think it helps with better patient care
Yes, healthcare students should learn & train in patient psychology along with medicine.
Improved doctor - patient communication like actively listening to the patient and showing empathy builds strong rapport and trust between patients and health care professionals.we all know about placebo effect right? Where patient health improves after taking dummy treatment driven by their belief like that only some patients insists to treat by certain individual doctor because they trust that doctor.it all depends on patient psychology.