Summary for Vocational Registered Medical Practitioners using Micro Counselling Skills

This is to explain the system for gaining Clinical Audit points for the Royal Australian College of general practitioners. In this activity, you compare your skills, both before and after reading the text 'The Fifteen Minute Hour' by Drs Stuart and Liebermann.

For this activity, you obtain consent from each patient and then make audio cassette recordings of 4 consultations, each of ten to fifteen minutes minimum duration. These consultations can be for a longer period. You record these before reading the text.

The consultations need to record an interaction between yourself and the patient which is of a counselling nature, preferably in the form of a conversation rather than just one person talking. The counselling need not be purely regarding psychological matters and may be counselling about medical problems such as cholesterol, hypertension, diabetes, etc. You then listen to the cassettes and assess your own use of micro counselling skills using a checklist.

Next you send the cassette/s here for assessment. The contents of your recordings are kept confidential.

You record 4 more consultations with the same or different patients two months after the activity. The pre and post text cassette assessments will be compared, to show the influence of the text upon your counselling style.

You will be given feedback about your micro counselling skills. Be yourself when interviewing. Many of the doctors participating in this activity are already highly skilled in counselling and so their style may not alter markedly. Nonetheless it is very valuable for you to listen to yourself in a counselling situation, as well as to dissect out the various techniques of communication you use with patients. Even small changes in micro counselling skills can help communication markedly.

This activity is only required for doctors wishing to acquire Clinical Audit points and is independent of the Continuing Professional Development (CPD) points which are allocated separately for doctors participating in College courses.

This is a practical and worthwhile exercise.

There is a more detailed explanation of the Clinical Audit process available to you upon request or when you enrol to do Clinical Audit with a course.