Healthcare providers and patients: an essay on the importance of professional assertiveness in healthcare today

Abstract

Professional assertiveness can enable the healthcare provider to confidently share their expertise without seeming authoritarian to the patient. Professional assertiveness is an interpersonal communication skill that helps express opinions or knowledge while respecting similar competencies in others. For healthcare providers, this compares to sharing scientific or professional knowledge with their patients while respecting their person, ideas, and autonomy. Professional assertiveness also connects the patient’s beliefs and values with actual scientific evidence and healthcare system constraints. The definition of professional assertiveness might be easy to understand, but it remains challenging to apply in clinical practice. In this essay, we hypothesize that the practical difficulties healthcare providers encounter with assertive communication stem from their misunderstanding of this style.