We are committed to improving healthcare communication in several ways.
Our value is to inspire healthcare professionals to communicate skilfully with patients and their families and friends and get the best out of their interactions with colleagues.
We aim to enhance how you communicate and interact with others and improve your confidence and belief in yourself – ‘that you are often enough’. You have great intentions and motivations to care for people well, but we can help you do better and look after yourself.
When delivering our communication skills training, we hear, time and time again, how nurses, doctors, and allied healthcare professionals hold on to challenging experiences for many years in some cases. For example, some people reflect on how they could have communicated better, how they could have shared information better, and how they could have interacted with a patient so much better. The burden we place on ourselves can be significant. The phrase ‘beating yourself up’ comes to mind.
In our training, we explore these challenges and help you consider ways you can move forwards by giving you some communication skills and strategies to use in your future practice.
‘It is a great opportunity to learn about your own strengths and weaknesses in order to develop into a better, more skilled communicator. It was a very warm, friendly environment that creates the perfect learning opportunity to develop yourself.’ (course attendee)
Take a peek at our communication skills training pages
Communication skills training
Coming from a nursing and academic background, the CEO Lynn Furber, has been invited by several healthcare companies within the charitable and educational sector to work collaboratively with them to help them achieve their aims and objectives. This consultancy work often includes elements of research and evaluation.
Often this work involves understanding the problem that needs to be fixed and helping them achieve a positive outcome. It might include evaluating a new process or structure within the organisation or evaluating a new training program.
Whatever the project, we aim to listen and work collaboratively with the team(s) to deliver a positive and timely outcome.
To see some examples of who we have worked with, please click on the following link.
Research and Evaluation
If we want to improve healthcare communication, we have to listen to those who use the services and learn from their good and bad experiences.
To enable us to capture those experiences, we encourage people to share their stories with us, and we will turn them into blogs which we will post on the website. We can also use those stories within our training to help healthcare professionals become better communicators.
Please take a look at our patient stories by clicking on the following link, and we encourage you to share your stories with us. People who have done this so far have found the experience helpful and enabled them to move on.
To help patients share what they want to say in a meeting with a healthcare professional, we have previously designed (along with patients and doctors) a consultation support tool to improve communication in the cancer setting.
There are lots of tools out there to help people improve communication but unless told they can, people don’t use them. Well, you can use question prompts or tools to help you make decisions about your care and treatment. Our tool is just one option. Please feel free to use it. Also, you may help your doctor or nurse out in the process because they can learn something about you and your needs and plan what they need to say to you or do to help you.
Click on this link to take you to the Patient information section of the website.
Patient
Testimonials have come from colleagues I work with, from people who have employed me to do consultancy projects for them and from patients and students.
If you want to know more about me, please click on the About page or follow this link.
Patients tell us in their own words what their healthcare experience in relation to communication was like. They provide key learning points they would like healthcare professionals and other patients to take away from their experience.
We provide education and informative blogs for patients and healthcare professionals to read. Additionally, we may link to interesting stories or articles we have found.
Nonyelum shares her thoughts about the importance of non-verbal communication between patients and healthcare professionals and provides some tips about how we can improve our skills.
Nonyelum is a pharmacy student but is very active within the BAME community and is passionate about supporting BAME healthcare professionals. She has written a blog to show how this can be achieved.
This blog provides details and links to various complaints services within the NHS.
Please complete the form on the right hand side and send.
