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Chapter 14
Tools to help you plan and
support self care
Tool 20
Determine your consulting style
Why you should use this
An aspect that you could look at in respect of assessing your consultation skills is to determine your consulting style, and the extent to which you are health professionalor patient-centred.
When to use this
As a health professional who is reviewing the extent to which their normal approach is to be patient-centred and enable patients to receive the care that they seek.
What to do
Rate where you think you usually are on the scale in Box T20.1. You can increase the objectivity of this exercise by asking others to complete it about you. You could ask colleagues to complete the scale judging by their experience of sharing patients with you.
How it works (insight)
Doing this exercise should help you to consider the extent to which you are patientcentred or health professional-centred, to keep your determination to promote and support self care, in balance with the reasons that the patient is consulting with you.
Whom to engage
Any health professional in the practice can do this.
How much time you should allow
The minimum time this exercise should take is 50 minutes, allowing a little time for reflection and involving ten patients in giving you feedback.
What a facilitator should do
Encourage health professionals you are facilitating, to support self care in a way that is individualised to the patients who are consulting.
What to do next
Sell the importance of supporting self care as an integral part of a patient-centred consultation.
What makes it work better
It will be better if you ask up to ten patients to complete the scale from their perspectives – and compare whether they agree with your own rating if you dare!
What can go wrong
- An individual health professional without insight completes the chart for a variety of patients, rating themselves incorrectly as being patient-centred, which then serves to reinforce their pattern of consulting behaviour.
- Health professionals who do not care whether they are rated as being health professional- or patient-centred so long as they get through their everyday work.