Summary
Key Takeaways
- Communication is a core competency for all health and social care providers, and its therapeutic use is critical to providing quality, safe care to clients-patients.
- Therapeutic communication is the ability of a health and social care provider to use trust-building techniques with a client-patient in order to promote well-being and provide the appropriate care and treatment.
- The Global Interprofessional Therapeutic Communication Scale© (GITCS©) is an assessment instrument developed to evaluate communication skills of health and social care providers.
- GITCS© can be used in virtual simulations or in clinical settings as a teaching and learning rubric for evaluating the communication abilities of health and social care learners and providers.
- Interprofessional health and social care providers can improve their ability to communicate therapeutically through training and repeated use of the GITCS©.
- Effective interprofessional communication relies on collaboration, professional ethical standards, and an appreciation of the perspectives within each discipline.
- A health and social care professional must have a deep understanding of the diversity of client-patient beliefs, cultures, attitudes, values and behaviours in order to communicate effectively and provide culturally acceptable and respectful care.
- GITCS© is an instructional and practice tool that can be used frequently to help strengthen the communication competencies of health and social care providers.
