Patient-Centered Communication

Abstract

As the population ages, morbidity and mortality associated with chronic disease will increase. Some patient-centered improvements have been made in health care services, but optimal health has not been fully realized. Only when pharmacists have a holistic understanding of an individual patient, including their experience of illness and medication, can they effectively assess appropriateness, safety, efficacy, and adherence to medications and develop realistic treatment plans. When patients are involved in their care, they are better able to manage complex chronic conditions by understanding and adhering to their plan of care. Pharmacists can enable patients to participate fully using patient-centered communication. There are relatively few published articles on patient-centered communication specific to pharmacists, but the Calgary-Cambridge guide and Four Habits model have applicability to pharmacy practice. The Patient-Centered Communication Tools (PaCT), created for use in pharmacy education and loosely based on the Four Habits model, can assist pharmacists in developing their patient-centered communication skills. Lastly, best practices for patient-centered communication in pharmacy practice are described.

The Community Pharmacist: Perceived Barriers and Patient-Centered Care Communication

“…It requires the pharmacists to strengthen the loyalty-based relationship which is the basis of the community pharmacy professional practice. More specifically, as initially enlightened by the 1997 WHO report Preparing the Pharmacist of the Future: Curricular Development, the pharmacist, in order to be defined as an effective communicator, must focus on building an open exchange of information and on involving patients in the treatment decision-making process [3,28,42,43].…”

“…In addition, the pharmacist must also often deal with patients belonging to different ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and religious backgrounds, including potential eating habits-related illnesses (e.g., rickets and osteomalacia due to malnutrition or dietary deficiencies) [52], specific religious-related food prohibitions or traditions (e.g., pork and Ramadan for Muslims), spoken or written language barriers, etc. The pharmacists, therefore, must firstly understand the needs of each patient and adapt the message to the recipient [3,43]. Health provider attitude sometimes can be an obstacle to effective patient-centered communication, hence the pharmacist "must maintain a high level of humility about their scientific knowledge so that the knowledge of the patient can be recognized" [43,53].…”

“…The pharmacists, therefore, must firstly understand the needs of each patient and adapt the message to the recipient [3,43]. Health provider attitude sometimes can be an obstacle to effective patient-centered communication, hence the pharmacist "must maintain a high level of humility about their scientific knowledge so that the knowledge of the patient can be recognized" [43,53].…”

“…There is a lack of literature on pharmacy patient-centered communication and the few existing examples applied to pharmacy practice are derived from those developed for physicians [43,79,80], such as the Calgary-Cambridge guide (CCG) [81] and the Four Habits model (FHM) [43,82].…”

“…The outcomings from the FHM application in the pharmacy field raised the need for the ideation of a new instrument, specific to student pharmacist-patient communication skills, able to both measure communication and to assess the pharmacist-patient relationship. This framework, called the Patient-centered Communication Tools (PaCT), includes 23 skills organized into five general "tools" to be taught to students at an academic level [43,74].…”