Can a five-hour workshop help healthcare professionals feel better prepared for difficult conversations?

Details

This study described the experience of the Italian Program to Enhance Relations and Communication Skills (PERCS-Italy), a program for difficult healthcare conversations. The program has been offered at two different hospitals in Milan since 2008.

Each workshop lasts 5 hours and enrolls 10–15 participants from different professional disciplines. It centers on simulations and debriefing of two difficult conversations. In a before-and-after workshop evaluation, participants rated their preparation, communication, relational skills, confidence, and anxiety on 5-point Likert scales. The program’s usefulness, quality, and whether participants would recommend it were also assessed. Analyses used descriptive statistics, t-tests, repeated-measures ANOVA, and Chi-square tests.

A total of 72 workshops had been offered, involving 830 participants from different professional disciplines. Participants reported improvements in all assessed dimensions (p < 0.001), with no differences between the two hospitals. Nurses and other professionals reported greater improvements in preparation, communication skills, and confidence than physicians and psychosocial professionals. The usefulness, quality, and recommendation of PERCS programs received high ratings, with no differences by professional discipline.

PERCS-Italy was found to be adaptable to different hospital settings, both public and private. After the workshops, clinicians reported improvements in their self-reported competencies for facing difficult conversations. The abstract attributes the program’s sustainability to its flexible format combined with a solid learner-centered approach. Future directions include introducing booster sessions to maintain learning and assessing behavioral changes.