How Do You Communicate a Disappointing Outcome? 

Even though providers do their best to avoid negative outcomes, sometimes things don’t go as planned. How should providers communicate with patients and families when the outcome is not what they hoped for?
In this video, Dr. Michael Haglund, a Professor of Surgery at Duke University Medical Center, demonstrates how providers should and shouldn’t communicate a disappointing outcome, based on the work of Dr. Neil Prose. Watch two versions of the same scene, in which an actor playing the wife of a patient who had surgery to remove a brain tumor experiences the impact of a provider’s verbal and nonverbal communication.
This video was produced by Firestream Media with a grant from the Duke Graduate Medical Education Innovation Fund. For more on how the creators used this video as part of a program on physician-patient communication, read this article in the Journal of Surgical Education. www.jsurged.org/article/S1931-...