 Case studies / examples
A long term care ward in a regional hospital wanted to provide a better experience for minorities and their own care givers.
The medical staff in the ward was highly motivated with few signs of burn out. They were largely middle-class and white as are the majority of their patients. Because their patients were gravely ill, the staff wasn’t surprised by the flare-ups and confrontations that sometimes erupted. But the hospital had earned a reputation for their forward-thinking approach to cultural competence. They provided education and briefings on the needs of people from diverse backgrounds. And the staff was working to give every patient an experience of quality care. So, they were hurt by the occasional charges of racism (“you wouldn’t be doing this if I were white”).
The department asked for Interplay’s help following a difficult and unexpected run-in with an African American family. As a woman of color herself, the social worker on the case was eager to show her support to this family. Consequently, she was startled to learn that the family had filed a complaint against the staff.
We created a custom training program with three goals:
- Increase the staff’s ability to make their compassion visible to patients. Clearly, the staff was compassionate. They just needed a procedure for making that compassion plain to patients, especially when patients were upset.
- Help the staff learn to “step off the emotional line of fire”. In other words, give the staff skills to identify patient needs and work out solutions without taking on guilt or blame for the way patients feel, and
- Improve the staff’s ability to support one another through stressful times
The training program featured five live scenarios. We trained professional actors to recreate the interactions the staff had identified as very challenging. We used the first scenario to teach the staff a step-by-step process for demonstrating empathy. The trainees received one-on-one coaching through the remaining four scenarios.
The department manager reported a decrease in confrontations and escalations in the ward following the training. She was spending less time defusing conflict and more time congratulating staff on their work with families. In addition, we received some feedback from a supervising nurse who had been part of the care team for the dissatisfied family described above. She had this to say about the training:
“I was amazed by the resemblance of the training scenarios to the real thing - having been in a couple of situations on which training scenarios were based. And it was great to have the opportunity to do them over again, this time with expert guidance in developing an approach … to handle the situations more constructively than had been possible in the original real life situations.”
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