10/31/2024
In honor of the Dodgers winning the World Series, I thought Iโd share how baseball and patient communication share some facts.
If you look at the research around patient communication, one of the most common sentiments by patients is that โNo one ever listened to me!โ
This frustration manifests as a lack of trust in the provider or the diagnosis. And this feeling creates a significant uptick in malpractice cases. (Most malpractice cases are based on communication issues, not on the procedure performedโฆinteresting.)
There was a study done by a group of researchers who wanted to capture just how long a patient would talk for if they were never interrupted. If the doctor sat there, interested, reassuring, but never interrupted the patient. The researchers wanted to know if the patient would talk for 5 minutes, 30 minutes, maybe an hourโฆ Just how long would it go on if the patient was never interrupted.
The results SHOCKED everyone.
FYI- when I ask this at our workshops, people working in healthcare most often guess that the conversation would go on for about 10 minutes.
The answer: the patients in the study averaged 92 seconds of talking.
Yup, youโre reading that correctly. Basically a minute and a half. Thatโs it.
(Iโll post a link to the research in the comments)
This came as a shock to me and to damn near everyone Iโve ever shared this with. 92 seconds. Just 92.
But the deal is that we, as providers, must LISTEN.
We must stop interrupting, even if that interruption is done with the best intent, like to clarify the type of pain or location. We must just listen.
Believe me, itโs tough.
But when we donโt listen, the patients often feel like they werenโt heard. If they werenโt heard, thereโs absolutely no way they were understood. And therefore their disease couldnโt be accurately diagnosed. And that can be a scary place to be.
But when you spend 92 seconds listening, patients often run out of steam. They feel heard. They โget it all outโ, and the mood totally shifts. They put down their hackles. Itโs no longer a fight for time.
Just 92 seconds.
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So what does this have to do with baseball?
Well about a year ago I taught this concept of listening for 92 seconds at the largest chiropractic conference in the world, called Parker Seminars Vegas.
After my talk a gentleman came up to me. He said that when heโs not treating patients, he works as a baseball umpire.
He said over the last 5 years, many more parents and coaches have unfortunately engaged in physical alterations with the umpire when arguing a call.
And since nobody became an ump to get beat up, he said this shift has resulted in a huge shortage of umpires in his area.
This became a huge problem since you canโt have competitive games without umpires.
So last year, the baseball organization hired a group to come in and train the umpires to quell issues before fights broke out. Yelling is acceptable from coaches, but fist fights arenโt.
The keystone to this โbaseball-specificโ training: They were taught to just LISTEN.
And guess how long they were taught to LISTEN for???
90 seconds.
Coincidence?
Great news: This gentleman reported that since the umpires have started listening, uninterrupted, for 90 seconds to a coach who is HOT about a call, magic has happenedโฆ..
Not a single fight has occurred. Not even one.
Thereโs still yelling and arguing and screaming. Thereโs still wild disagreement about whether the runner was safe or out.
But thereโs been no physical violence.
Almost as if that when the coaches are heard, they lower their hackles. Just a little. Just enough. Just cuz they were heard.
92 seconds. Try it.
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And if youโre a healthcare provider, Iโd love to have you join our workshop where we train on this concept and others. We stack up these research backed concepts with automated software to create the greatest possible patient experience. This results a wild increase in patient trust.
And when we have trust- after just 92 seconds- we can change the world of healthcare.
