In her last article on the role of communication in patient-centred care, Reena Barai explains why consultation skills are so important for community pharmacists.

Since writing these articles, pharmacists I know have come up to me and asked if I can help them pass their CPPE consultation skills assessment. I noticed it particularly at the beginning of the flu season.

The training to provide the new flu service this year involved completing a declaration of competence and one of the supporting assessments that is recommended is the consultation skills module. Many of my colleagues have either not done this or tried a few times, not passed, and given up. In fact some of my colleagues have questioned why you need consultation skills to give a flu jab.

One such pharmacist colleague of mine had not given any flu jabs before and asked if he could come and watch me do one so that he could feel more confident.

When the patient arrived I introduced myself, explained I had received training to provide the service, explained that I was going to ask a series of questions and then give the patient an opportunity to ask me any questions before I administered the flu jab. I also brought up the topic of pneumonia vaccination, and we discussed the pros and cons of having it.

Feedback

After the patient left I asked for feedback from my colleague. It turned out that he had been so worried about the actual injecting part and the management of adverse effects that he hadn’t thought about the need to practise the conversation as well as the injection technique. Could it be that we are so concerned by the need to obtain the end result that we don’t necessarily give consideration to the journey needed to get there?

Be it a flu jab, an OTC sale, a MUR or a stop smoking counselling conversation, the emphasis needs to change so that we offer these services with the patient, not the service, in mind.

Missing out

My colleague quite rightly pointed out that during the face-to-face training for the flu service, we were asked to roleplay the injection technique but not asked to role-play the conversation that goes along with it. This experience highlighted two things to me:

• We should really get out of our pharmacies more and shadow our peers in order to learn and share best practice. The peer review and feedback I received from my colleague was very valuable – both for me and him
• We need to be much more confident as pharmacists. By nature we are a risk averse profession and tend to worry about what could go wrong as opposed to what may actually go well.

By concentrating on improving our consultation skills we would all become more confident practitioners.

So my answer to those who question why we need to complete the consultation skills assessment as part of the declaration of competence, is that you can’t consider yourself competent if you can’t communicate with patients.

If you haven’t attempted the assessment, have a go. If not now, make it a resolution for 2016.