Strategies for improvement
ESTIMATED TIME: 5 minutes
- Record yourself on video
For instructions on videorecording click here.
- Record yourself on audiotape
Audio-taping your consultations is useful when you are focusing on spoken language. You can play the consult back to yourself so that you can listen to your pronunciation, rhythm, intonation, and so on.
This will help you to identify your language strengths and areas for improvement. The latter can be integrated into a learning plan of areas to work on.
- Gain Supervisor feedback
Having your Supervisor sit in on your consults, or watch a video of your consults with you, is very useful. Your Supervisor can provide feedback on what he or she observes to work well, and areas that may need to be improved. Your Supervisor can also help you to work out what it is that makes your consults successful, and assist in improving areas that are not working as well. They will be able to use their skills and experience to provide you with alternative consultation models.
- Gain Medical Educator feedback
Having a Medical Educator observe your consultation works well. The Medical Educator, being unfamiliar with your practice and patient population, can occasionally add a different, fresh perspective.
- Gain patient feedback
Patient feedback is a very useful way to know if you are ‘getting it right’. This can be done formally through tools such as the Doctors' Interpersonal Skills Questionnaire, which focuses on communication (contact Adelaide to Outback for more information).
Your practice may have a patient survey tool they use as part of practice accreditation, or you might be able to develop one. Patients will also give feedback on the consult with you to the reception staff or to the practice nurse, or to other doctors in the practice. Obtaining this informal feedback can be a useful way of gaining a sense of how you are fitting in.
- Engage in a peer review
Feedback from your peers (such as other doctors in the same situation or at the same level of training) can be very useful.
Additionally, workshops such as those provided by Adelaide to Outback are an excellent way to do get peer feedback, but other continuing professional development activities and discussions may also be the types of forums in which you could gain this feedback.