Consulting with Challenging Patients: Learning and Teaching

This three-day residential course is for practising doctors and communication skills tutors

Aims and objectives: Days 1 & 2: to help doctors develop their strategies and skills to deal with challenging consultations; Day 3: to provide a framework and skills to effectively teach patient consultations.

Date:  15-17 October 2008. Venue: Cumberland Lodge, Windsor Great Park    

Facilitators: Dr Peter Havelock, Associate Director in General Practice, Oxford, and others

Cost: £470, and will include a copy of the book The New Consultation, Pendleton, Schofield, Tate and Havelock, OUP 2003. Applicants outside the Oxford Deanery will need to add an extra £150.

Course content: Days 1 & 2: The course will use small group learning with introduction, setting out the possible approaches and theoretical basis of ‘difficult issues’ in consultations; practice of consulting with challenging patients and feedback from the group with wider discussion around the issues raised by each case. Topics that might be covered: breaking bad news; angry or complaining patients; talking about death and dying; demanding or manipulative patients; giving lifestyle advice; or evidence based patient choice. The choice of topics on the course will be decided by the course members.

Day 3: Small group learning using mini-presentations on the basis of effective teaching; the participants’ tapes of consultations; feedback and teaching from the group on the teaching and the consultation.