5 Essential Active Listening Techniques to Elevate Client Care

Healthcare professionals and caregivers can use active listening to improve client care by building trust. Increasing trust among clients can help them open up more about their concerns, providing healthcare professionals and caregivers with a better understanding of their health issues, and allowing for higher-quality care. If you think about it, you are more likely to take advice from someone you trust and who you feel cares about you, with healthcare knowledge being a bonus. This is compared to someone with whom you feel disconnected and who you feel may not have your best interest at heart. Active listening involves more than hearing but also feeling (1), and those feelings help foster empathy, another skill that is very valuable in client care.

Here are 5 Ways to Improve Active Listening:

1. Limit distractions– If we recall the purpose of active listening, it is to understand and feel what another person is feeling. So, having distractions can make it harder to listen and understand what someone else is trying to convey to you. This can lead to inappropriate recommendations and miscommunication, thus, poor health outcomes.

   
   

2. Show You Are Listening – A part of active listening is action, so show your client that you are listening. This can be demonstrated through facial expressions, body language, as well as appropriate and consented physical contact. As a healthcare professional or caregiver, you can show the client that you are actively listening by repeating or paraphrasing what they say. This also ensures that you are clear about the information your client is giving you and provides you with the opportunity to ask clarifying questions.

   
   

3. Empathy– Improving empathy skills can help improve active listening. Empathy involves understanding the thoughts and feelings of others. Listening and understanding are two different things. Understanding the thoughts and feelings of a client means taking their experiences to heart and giving them the type of care and concern you would want for a friend, family member, or yourself if you were in their position.

   
   

4. Wait to respond– In order to hear the message of your clients, it is important to give them the floor to communicate all that they want to share. It is vital not to cut them off while they are speaking because it can disrupt their train of thought. Also, your client may negatively respond to being cut off, like shutting down and putting up walls, as well as losing trust and the willingness to be open. It is also necessary, as a healthcare professional or caregiver, to give yourself time to reflect on what your client is trying to tell you.

   
   

5. Improve your Cultural Competence– It is important to respect and understand the cultures of your clients. Integrating their cultural practices and ideals, as long as they are appropriate, can help boost patient morale and trust, making them more likely to follow and understand recommendations. Cultural competence can also include having translators who can bridge the gap created by language barriers. Language barriers are a major obstacle to care as they can lead to misinterpretations, which become more likely without a proper translator, especially if the provider is not fluent in the client’s language. Cultural competence is also known to help reduce health disparities and inequities.

   
   

Active listening is one of the best practices physicians can use to improve client care because it allows physicians to listen for understanding rather than judgment. Incorporating these five steps can help pull out more information, leading to better outcomes.