Secrets of a Good Bedside Manner
Comments(0) A professor of dentistry once gave me a tip about the best time to visit the dentist. “Ideally you should go soon after your dentist has just seen their dentist. That’s when they are going to be most aware of what it’s like being a patient – and what a patient needs.”
The secret of having a good bedside manner is just this - to put yourself in your clients’ shoes. In this way almost anyone can enhance their bedside manner.
First though imagine this scene. Let’s say you go to see your health professional. You arrive at their practice premises. The support staff don’t pay you much attention because they’re all very occupied with other business. When you do get their attention they are curt and you feel like you’re trying their patience. So the way you feel will already have been affected - and you haven’t even seen the practitioner yet. In the NHS it’s no coincidence that a doctor’s key frontline staff who mediate between patients and doctors are sometimes referred to by both patients and staff as ‘dragons’!
Bedside manner then begins with the practice ambience. Whether you work on your own or with others their will be a practice ambience. So what is it? The best way to find out is to ask your clients/patients what it’s like for them.
So often when clients speak in glowing terms of a practitioner they speak not of the person’s professional skills – these are presupposed – but of how they felt with this person. “He really understood me… It seemed like she had all the time in the world for me…I didn’t feel hurried…She always looks me in the eye… He advised me and then allowed me to decide.” In a nutshell, feeling acknowledged and that someone cares and has time for you lies at the heart – and I do mean the heart – of the best bedside manner.
So consider for a moment, how would you describe your own bedside manner? Would you like to be on the receiving end of it? Who do you know who does it really well? If in doubt ask colleagues and clients. Consider who is most popular patients? I often ask practitioners to find three such role models of excellence and to really get to know how they do what they do. There are so many styles to choose from.
Bedside manner isn’t time consuming. It can be achieved quickly even with a busy schedule. First impressions are critical. It only takes a moment to be put off someone and for that impression to then colour what ensues. Equally you can set the tone in those first few moments by coming across as real, caring and available. How you do this varies from one person to another. The good news about bedside manner is that patients are extraordinarily flexible and are happy for you to do it in your own way. It is not the case that one size has to fit all. If you think of colleagues you either know or have heard of who have this rapport with their clients it’s clear that they don’t all do it the same way because they are very different kinds of people.
Ultimately bedside manner is about relationship – and this holds true whether you meet a client once only for ten minutes or every week for years.
At the heart of a good bedside manner is a living, breathing human being; a person who is able to be present with another human being who is probably anxious, uncertain and vulnerable. So a really useful point to start from is to ask yourself the following questions.
- What enables me to be present?
- What prevents me from being present?
If you want to enhance your bedside manner ensure you do and get more of what enables you to be present and change what prevents this. Your bedside manner is in part a function of your state. If you feel rushed and harassed, say, that’s probably going to affect how you come across to clients. The key question I often ask practitioners in workshops is, what do you need so that you can be at your best? Taking care of your needs will serve your clients well.
Paying attention to your bedside manner is worth doing not just for your client’s sake but for yours too. The capacity to be present and engage with another human being reduces the stress that the practitioner experiences. And, if that wasn’t enough, interesting work in the US makes clear that when patients have good rapport with their doctors there is a much lower incidence of litigation even when mistakes have occurred.
Your bedside manner is an intervention in its own right. You cannot not have a bedside manner. The only question is whether it’s effective in promoting healing.