ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about how consultants can identify and use the patient's preferred way of communicating to enhance their consultations with them. It also talks about determining how a patient processes information and using this to find the best way to communicate with them. Listening for and using the patient's own vocabulary of nouns, verbs and adjectives is important. Clinicians need to select words that are clear and straightforward to understand and ensuring they do not unwittingly use scary words. Words such as cancer, meningitis, heart attack, septicaemia, stroke, pre-eclampsia can hit patients like a punch in the stomach. People who are primarily visual take in information through what they see. People who are more auditory take in most information through words and language and from conversations with themselves or with others. Kinaesthetic people take in information through their feelings, both emotional and physical. Matching the patient's language will mean that clinician is talking the same 'dialect' as they are.
