For this Roadmap Stop, we invited Dr. Auguste Fortin to customize a skill-building session designed to help us create rapport and develop a shared agenda with our patients.  Dr. Fortin is a Master of the American College of Physicians and a Fellow of the Academy of Communication in Healthcare.  He is an expert in teaching providers how to improve their communication skills and has created a 3-session workshop designed to improve communication between patients and providers as well as between providers themselves.  This session was created specifically to help providers establish rapport with a diverse patient population.  This event has been planned in response to feedback from both patients and providers.

Ineffective communication by healthcare professionals leads to negative outcomes including poor adherence to treatment plans, increased length of stay, increased readmission rates, and increased litigation. Despite the importance of strong communication skills, physicians, physicians assistants and nurses receive little training in the procedure of communication beyond the first years of their training. 

YNHHS and Yale Medicine, in partnership with the Academy of Communication in Healthcare are delighted to offer the Enhancing Relationship-Centered Communication (ERCC) Training Program, virtually. ERCC is an interactive and engaging series of three, two-hour workshops that teach communication skills to improve patient outcomes, patient experience and clinician professional satisfaction. Brief didactic presentations introduce three skillsets, which are reinforced with live demonstrations, skills practice, guided feedback and coaching.

The three skillsets address patient experience measures of treating others with courtesy and respect, listening carefully, and explaining things in a way that patients can understand.

ERCC training is a transformational process that reignites purpose and improves communication not only between professionals and patients but inter-professionally and personally, leading to decreased levels of dissatisfaction and burnout.

Goals of Skillset One:
1. To help health care workers build rapport with diverse patients in hospital and clinic settings

2. To improve patient empowerment by eliciting all of the patient’s concerns and developing a shared agenda for the encounter

3. To describe the tangible benefits of relationship-centered communication