Beyond Clinical Skills

Hey friends 👋🏻

I’m being a bit selfish in this week’s newsletter because I want to do a quick reflection on some non clinical skills that I find helpful in navigating my job. And if I were to do another reflection later this year, I want to see if I would still say something similar, or if I would have changed my mind in some aspects.

To give you an idea of the things I need to achieve in my job, here are a few tasks I usually do:

• Review the chart and pick out pertinent context from the past and recent notes

• Gather information from the patient to help make clinical decisions through conversations

• Analyze the information and make sense of the situation

• Observe for signals of both benefits and side effects through observations and conversations with the patient and care team

So really, the knowledge in dosing medications may be a skill that is needed to do one of those tasks. The rest are the skills beyond clinical.

Here are some soft skills that I find pretty essential in doing a good job.

Communication

I really value the power of communication the longer I practice. Good communication solves problems. Poor communication causes problems.

What I realize in my day to day conversations is that we all speak the same language, but the effectiveness and precision in delivering an idea, and the ability to receive and interpret a message, vary so much from person to person.

And if the patient and I are not on the same page, the right thing to do isn’t to brush it off but to try different ways to convey the idea.

If what it takes is to draw diagrams, print out tables, or use metaphors, then those are the tools for communication for that particular interaction.

Learning

I’ve spent more time listening to audiobooks and podcasts since I broke away from the idea that learning must come from reading.

Learning in some way is an introspective process. You can learn something you don’t know. You can learn something you do know, but hear a different interpretation from others. You can learn something you know from the opposing view and see what others see that you don’t.

The more I learn, the less I feel like I really know about this world because things are constantly changing.

Reasoning

I like to tell my students, things have to make sense. And to make sense of things, you have to reason it through.

And when you push your limit to reason things through, you start to ask questions instead of accepting what’s in front of you when it doesn’t make sense.

Asking questions and reasoning have become more and more important in the era of AI when a better question gets you a better answer.

Accepting

This one is more personal.

I learned to accept that it’s not a fault when there is disagreement, and nobody really needs to win in a disagreement.

I also learned to accept my limitations in knowledge and skillset, which is why I invite others for their expertise.

PS: I’m thinking of doing a virtual meet up to talk about the hardships we face dosing opioids as clinicians. Would you be interested?

Thank you for reading as always 🙇🏻

SP