We are inviting healthcare practitioners and students—physicians, nurses, counselors, therapists—as well as patients, and the families and friends of patients to share accounts of healing or wounding communication in medical settings—doctors' offices, hospitals, hospices, clinics—with the intention of using this information to improve communications between doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals and those who depend on them for care. We invite accounts of events that you were directly involved in as an actor or direct observer.
Our intention is to use this information to help guide us as we prepare a publication on communication in healthcare to identify what forms of communication are most powerfully positive for people, what forms are most painful, and to gather some speaking examples of both that come from real people with real stories to tell—people who want to tell their stories in order to make a positive difference for themselves, and others, in the future. We intend to develop a book that will be equally valuable to patients and practitioners.
We are providing you with a standard questionnaire to get you started. This is not intended as a scientific quantitative survey, but we are very interested in the quality of your responses, making sure that people consider similar issues so that information can be more readily and persuasively shared with others. The questions we ask here are designed to help you identify the small shifts in intellectual frame, emotional response, and verbal and non-verbal behaviors that can greatly increase the level of comfort and trust between healthcare provider and patient.
You don't need to answer the questions as questions, just review your story and see that you have addressed them as best you can. We do ask you to consider your story from different points of view and to identify another circumstance that is different in quality from the one you are describing now (positive if your main story is negative, negative if your main story is positive).
Thank you for taking the time to share these important experiences with us.
If you are interested in learning about the results of the project when it is finished, please indicate this when you submit, otherwise we will simply copy your submission into our data base and delete your e-mail address from our files.
QUESTIONNAIRE DO NO HARM Healing and Wounding Communication in Medicine
POINT
1. Is this an example of healing or wounding speech? Choose one example
of either healing or wounding communication to focus on here.
2. Were you a participant or an observer of the interaction?
3. What happened?
a. Setting: (hospital, clinic, doctor's office, hospice, home)
b. Describe the situation:
c. Describe the participants:
d. What were the significant comments and behavior?
e. How did body language intensify or counteract the words?
f. Immediate responses to the comments and behavior from the recipient? From bystanders?
g. Long term consequences?
4. What do you feel was most damaging (healing) about the comments and behavior?
5. Why do you think the person who was wounding (healing) spoke the way he or she did?
6. Was this professional aware of the impact of his or her words and/or behavior at the time? Later?
7. Do you think anyone observing this interaction would have interpreted it as you have—as clearly wounding (healing)?
8. If this is an example of wounding speech, did the person responsible do anything to try and repair the relationship?
9. What other responses do you think were possible in this situation? Why do you think they weren't chosen?
COUNTERPOINT
10. Do you have an example of a similar situation where communication
between caregiver and patient had an opposite but equally powerful
impact? (Healing impact if your preceding example was about wounding
communication, wounding impact if your previous example was of healing
communication.)
11. What was said and done in this opposite instance?
12. Why were these words and non-verbal communications particularly effective or ineffective?
NATURE OR NURTURE
13. In examples of healing speech, do you think this skill was just
natural to the healthcare professional or that the patient, people with
the patient, or the other professionals around helped create the more
positive situation? How?
14. In examples of wounding speech, do you feel that the person who did
the wounding would speak differently if he or she knew how? Why or why
not?
15. Did answering the questions on this questionnaire affect how you
think or feel about the wounding (healing) event described here? If
yes, how?
GENERAL INFORMATION
16. Please provide the following information about yourself:
Sex:
Age:
Profession:
State:
17. How did you learn about the questionnaire?
FOLLOW-UP
18. Is there anything else you feel is pertinent and you would like to have included?
19. Would you like to be interviewed further on this subject? If yes, please provide relevant contact information.
