One thing that has really opened my eyes in the last week of prac has to do with communication. I’m on my neuro placement and I think that sometimes my patients just don’t understand what we are asking them to do but what I’ve learnt is that you actually need to give your patients enough time to allow for mental processing of the task to occur and then see what they can do. As they already have a neurological insult, the thought process is already going to take a little longer. Whether its part of the task or the whole thing, they may just surprise you in what they can do. And this is patients that may not necessarily have any language or perceptual problems.
This should be taken into consideration also when you are dealing with patients that have English as a second language as even if they do not understand English completely, the parts they know take time to process and translate.
So the thing I have learnt is to let your patients have enough time to organise their thoughts before we rule out that they are unable to do a certain task, due to any of the above reasons, because they may just surprise you and then that makes your job that little bit easier if you don’t have to assist them with something that they actually can do quite independently.
1 comment:
I have massive issues with this problem... As not a huge fan of awkward silences have found it really hard to wait for their response. Recently I had a patient who had dementia and didnt speak english.. All i could do to effectively communicate with him was make him laugh by massively big hand gestures.. I tried learning a few sentences of italian which helped for subsequent treatments even if you cant communicate with them... I find it has helped build abt of trust by just showing them you care and acknowledge english not to be their first language.
Laughter is after all, the best medicine!
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