Communication
Memo to Support the Adoption of Active Listening
Medical Practice Staff
Office Manager
Re;
Active Listening
Active listening may offer a great deal of potential to increase the effectiveness of communication which takes within the practice, creating increased clarity and reducing the potential for misunderstandings, especially with patients who may be emotional or find communication difficult. Research by Street and Haidet (2011), looked specifically at communication between doctors and patients, and found frequent significant gap between physicians' perception of the patients' health concerns and actual beliefs and concerns, creating the potential for misunderstanding. Factors that were attributed to the problem were presumptions and communication issues between the two parties. While this research looked at doctors, other authors have extended this...
The idea is that in communication there are distractions; for example, in a conversation the parties' communication may be waiting for a pause in the conversation so that they can speak; this detracts from the attention they are paying to the speaker. Likewise, if one party to the conversation is emotional they may not communicate clearly.
Active listening is a simple process, but takes time to practice. The basic concept is for the listener to repeat back to the speaker what they have said, paraphrasing it and then wait for agreement (Noesner and Webster, 1997). If the repeating…
