Communication Skills
Focused History Taking and Effective Patient Interview
The history is the only investigation that is always available, costs nothing and is never out of stock, and it is the one most of us were taught worst. This course rebuilds the consultation as a procedure with a shape: how you open it, how you question, how you structure what you hear, and how you get the truth out of a patient who travelled ninety kilometres, cannot afford the test you are about to order, and is sitting on a shared ward where four other people can hear every word. Three hours, six modules, and three worked patients at the end.
3.0 CPD credit hour · 0 modules · 180 minutes · 80% to pass · UGX 25,000
Course aim
To make the clinical interview a deliberate, repeatable procedure that produces an accurate history, surfaces red flags early, and holds up in the notes.
What you will be able to do
- Open a consultation so that the patient states their own agenda before you begin directing it.
- Choose between open, focused and closed questioning deliberately, and recognise the questions that manufacture false histories.
- Take a complete structured history, including the medication history that covers drug shops, leftover tablets, injections and herbal preparations.
- Analyse any symptom to a standard that separates the diagnoses on your differential.
- Identify red flags in the history that change the disposal of the patient before any examination or test.
- Conduct a consultation across a language barrier using an interpreter correctly, and protect disclosure where there is no privacy.
- Write a history that another clinician can act on at two in the morning without you present.
Who it is for
- Clinical Officers
- Medical Officers
- Dental Officers
- Allied Health Professionals
Competencies
- Patient-centred interviewing: agenda setting, active listening and eliciting ideas, concerns and expectations
- Structured history taking across all standard domains including medication, allergy, family and social history
- Symptom analysis and hypothesis-driven questioning to build and narrow a differential diagnosis
- Recognition of history-based red flags and danger signs requiring urgent action or referral
- Communication across language, literacy and cultural barriers, including correct use of interpreters
- Accurate, defensible clinical documentation of the history