Govt doctors to train in soft-skills to minimise conflicts with patients

The Union health ministry’s National Institute of Health and Family Welfare (NIHFW) is planning to start a dedicated course to train doctors at government hospitals in soft-skills that will help them communicate more effectively with patients and attendants and minimise the rising incidents of patient-doctor confrontation, people familiar with the matter said.

“It is going to be well-designed training course with several components to it — training doctors on how to communicate well with their patients and those accompanying them is going to a part of the course. It will also have other components that would include training doctors in how to document better in medico-legal cases so that it holds up in the court of law,” said Dr Dheeraj Shah, director, National Institute of Health and Family Welfare.

The institute, an autonomous organisation, under Union ministry of health and family welfare, acts as an apex technical institute as well as a think tank for the promotion of health and family welfare programmes in the country.

To look for ways to reduce patient doctor confrontations has been one of the priority areas of the government, given the rising number of cases especially in public sector health care facilities where staff strength is usually inadequate to handle the massive patient load.

The detailed analysis of such episodes has largely found that in most cases the confrontations are a result of communication of gap, which is why the health ministry considered training the staff in key aspects of communication. Apart from communication skills, the course will also focus on patient psychology, leadership skills, and time management.

Another important component will be to teach junior doctors how to manage paper-work in medico-legal cases efficiently.

“At the moment many cases fall flat because the paper work is not up to the mark. This (solid paper work) is an important requirement for cases to withstand court scrutiny; therefore, it will be a crucial part of the training. This will also be a part of the programme,” said Dr Shah.

The duration of the course is still being worked out.

“It is still being decided whether to make it a training programme or a full-fledged certificate course; certificate courses usually are of longer duration as compared to training programmes that last a day or two,” added Dr Shah.

The institute already runs diploma and degree courses pertaining to community health, health administration, public health and various training porgrammes such as bioethics and good clinical practices. The diplomas and degrees are awarded in affiliation with the Delhi University (DU) and Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) even though there has been a proposal submitted to the government to turn the institute into a deemed university in future.

“Our courses and training programmes have been running for a while and we keep updating our ongoing courses from time to time, and adding new courses and programmes based on current requirements. These courses are useful as they are meticulously drafted after extensive research by experts, and hence quite popular among the health care professionals,” said Dr Shah.