This is an e-learning course, focusing on essential communication skills, which is accessible and easy to complete in your own time. The course is suitable for a range of people who work in health and social care.
This essential communication skills course is designed for all healthcare and social care personnel. It helps participants reflect on their communication practice and style to build confidence and develop skills for more effective interactions with others.
Communication is a skill we often take for granted, yet it underpins everything we do. By learning more about it, you can have more effective conversations with patients, their relatives, and colleagues. This helps by strengthening workplace interactions, enhancing patient experience, building rapport, and developing more meaningful professional relationships. Greater communication knowledge can also boost confidence and reduce emotional fatigue and burnout.
Communication is frequently dismissed as a soft skill, but it is far more than that, it is an essential skill for healthcare professionals, administration, and social care teams to engage with others effectively.
This online, interactive course can be completed in your own time. Through reading, exercises, and reflection, you will explore the principles of communication and practical techniques to maintain and enhance your skills. Topics include barriers to communication, active listening, facilitative skills, and strategies for communicating across different situations and contexts.
Becoming a more mindful communicator enables you to have more meaningful, supportive conversations by fostering empathy, person-centred care, and stronger relationships with both patients and colleagues.
This is an online course that you can complete in your own time and wherever you feel comfortable to learn. It will take approximately 1-2 hours to complete. On the course you will work through the following topics, systematically:
Which explores: the communication process, what causes communication to go wrong
Which includes: five common communication barriers, how to remove communication barriers and explores your approach to solving a communication barrier.
Which include: how to make the right first impressions, how to focus on the other person and five go to conversation starters
Which explores: verbal communication and non verbal communication by inviting you to participate in some short and reflective exercises. In this section we will explore how non-verbal communication influences trust, understanding and engagement.
Which explores: what is effective listening? how to show you are listening and have heard someone.
Which includes: when to ask closed questions, and explores types of open questions and when best to use them and how to develop essential questioning skills.
You are asked to engage in an exercise to explore any unconscious bias (defined as a prejudice in favour or or against one thing, person or group, compared to another, usually in a way considered to be unfair. This is a really powerful and enlightening exercise.
This course is ideal for anyone working with and interacting with others. Your level of experience and qualifications doesn’t matter. A wide range of people have already accessed the course and range from senior healthcare professionals, including nurses and allied healthcare professionals, to healthcare assistants and ward receptionists.
This course is suitable for you if you are:
The learning outcomes for this course vary from person to person. People who have completed this course have said that it helps them have more person centred conversations with their patients or service users and it helps them consider the simple elements of communication that they have taken for granted or not fully considered previously. In fact, this course is a mandatory course for many healthcare professionals to engage with on a yearly basis in some of the organisations we work with.
It is not uncommon for people to think they have the ability to communicate well, until they start to explore communication skills and learn how they can enhance the skills they already have, further. Previous course participants have said that the course enabled them to feel more confident and to consider aspects of communication that they had never considered before. The unconscious bias section of the course often generates discussion and proves enlightening for people.
The course provides examples of how communication can impact our patients or service users, positively or negatively.
This course is evidence based and informed by research to ensure high quality training. The aim of this essentials communication skills course is to provide you with a stronger foundation to understand the key principles of communication and how you can enhance your communication skills further.
Course participants will feel more confident and skilled in communication and appreciate the importance of communication and how we interact with others. Everyone who completes this course, learns something unique about themselves. It is a good foundation course, if you are considering applying for an advanced communication skills course.
The course is designed to help you:
This effective communication skills course provides you with an opportunity to reflect on your current understanding and knowledge of essential communication skills. The course enables you to identify your own strengths and weaknesses and enables you to consider areas of your practice, you might want to practice further.
The lessons will help you appreciate the importance and relevance of first impressions and how our body language and verbal communication can set the tone and quality of conversations. Effective listening is integral to communication and is something we all need to work at, but we also need to take this a step further and demonstrate that we have heard what someone has to say, particularly so when having difficult conversations or highly emotive conversations. Knowing what type of questions to ask when and the impact questions can have on the quality of our conversations is important too. For example, if we are having a challenging conversation with someone and we resort to ‘why’ type questions, we can receive negative feedback and complicate our conversations further.
If you require any further information about this course, please contact us via our website and we can answer any questions you might have. Alternatively, email us at, [email protected]
When I started, I wasn't entirely sure what to expect, but Lynn soon put me at ease and went on to create a truly trusting and supportive environment in which to work.
I now have a greater understanding that my role is not always to fix every problem.
A review of a bespoke motivational interviewing course by a physiotherapist who organised two courses in the North East of England
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