How to Improve Doctor-Patient Connection offers actionable steps for improving communication between health professionals and patients based on visual, auditory, and emotional understanding from the principles of cognitive psychology. Drawing on the author’s personal experience as both a healthcare professional and a mother of two children, How to Improve Doctor-Patient Connection explores communication between doctors and patients as well as bias in healthcare. This how-to text includes several practical applications that can be applied to healthcare encounters, enabling readers to form habits based on visual analysis of body language, auditory information from language and tone of voice, and logical emotion perception that will allow for improved doctor-patient connection. By integrating the perspectives of both doctors and patients and applying a psychological lens, this text is invaluable to healthcare practitioners, students of medicine, healthcare, biology, and related fields, and anyone looking to improve their own or other’s quality of doctor-patient interactions and overall healthcare experience.

This 2006 volume provides a comprehensive discussion of communication between doctors and patients in primary care consultations. It brings together a team of leading contributors from the fields of linguistics, sociology and medicine to describe each phase of the primary care consultation, identifying the distinctive tasks, goals and activities that make up each phase of primary care as social interaction. Using conversation analysis techniques, the authors analyze the sequential unfolding of a visit, and describe the dilemmas and conflicts faced by physicians and patients as they work through each of these activities. The result is a view of the medical encounter that takes the perspective of both physicians and patients in a way that is both rigorous and humane. Clear and comprehensive, this book will be essential reading for students and researchers in sociolinguistics, communication studies, sociology, and medicine.

The Institute of Medicine study Crossing the Quality Chasm (2001) recommended that an interdisciplinary summit be held to further reform of health professions education in order to enhance quality and patient safety. Health Professions Education: A Bridge to Quality is the follow up to that summit, held in June 2002, where 150 participants across disciplines and occupations developed ideas about how to integrate a core set of competencies into health professions education. These core competencies include patient-centered care, interdisciplinary teams, evidence-based practice, quality improvement, and informatics. This book recommends a mix of approaches to health education improvement, including those related to oversight processes, the training environment, research, public reporting, and leadership. Educators, administrators, and health professionals can use this book to help achieve an approach to education that better prepares clinicians to meet both the needs of patients and the requirements of a changing health care system.

Presenting a series of empirical studies by scholars working with approaches from ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, Medical and Healthcare Interactions studies real-life work and training encounters among medical and healthcare professionals and trainees or between professionals and patients. Using video analysis and detailed description, it considers the methods and procedures through which professionals, trainees, and patients produce actions and interpret those of others, exploring questions of member competence and socialization within situated courses of interaction. The book offers fruitful contributions for training and education in the field of healthcare and will appeal to scholars in the human and social sciences with interests in interaction, ethnomethodology, and conversation analysis.

Racial and ethnic disparities in health care are known to reflect access to care and other issues that arise from differing socioeconomic conditions. There is, however, increasing evidence that even after such differences are accounted for, race and ethnicity remain significant predictors of the quality of health care received. In Unequal Treatment, a panel of experts documents this evidence and explores how persons of color experience the health care environment. The book examines how disparities in treatment may arise in health care systems and looks at aspects of the clinical encounter that may contribute to such disparities. Patients' and providers' attitudes, expectations, and behavior are analyzed. How to intervene? Unequal Treatment offers recommendations for improvements in medical care financing, allocation of care, availability of language translation, community-based care, and other arenas. The committee highlights the potential of cross-cultural education to improve provider-patient communication and offers a detailed look at how to integrate cross-cultural learning within the health professions. The book concludes with recommendations for data collection and research initiatives. Unequal Treatment will be vitally important to health care policymakers, administrators, providers, educators, and students as well as advocates for people of color.

""This book examines practical applications of healthcare analytics for improved patient care, resource allocation, and medical performance, as well as for diagnosing, predicting, and identifying at-risk populations"--