Beth Eaby-Sandy, MSN, CRNP of University of Pennsylvania discusses barriers to patient communication advertising, clinical jargon, and encouraging hopeful messages, especially on lung cancer patients. As clinicians, it is very important set the expectations of the patients first hand. This is because some patients, when they go to the doctors or an institution, they might think that their disease will surely be cured or be gone, which, in most lung cancer cases is not true.
In addition, Dr. Eaby-Sandy stresses on the importance of good communication. It is very important to simplify the information, in a way that patients can easily understand the critical details about the disease. Instead of using the words progression-free survival, PFS, or overall survival,” doctors can say, the chances that this treatment will going to work is… or the chances that in three or four months that this treatment will work is unfortunately not average. Clinicians can use milder, yet understandable way to explain rather than using clinical jargons.
Finally, the most effective way in having a conversation with patients is in a very hopeful and friendly manner. Based on data from a certain study, the more hopeful and align physicians is with the patients, the better is the information received and the more the patients understand the information being given.