Emphasizing on the need for the young doctors to develop soft skills to enable them to handle their patients with a human touch, Dr Ravi Kumar, medical oncologist from Global Hospitals, has embarked on a novel initiative of imparting free soft skills to young doctors in Hyderabad. “We have started this initiative with a mission to create patient friendly doctors and our motto is to empower the doctor and patient relationship,” says Dr Ravi Kumar.

Launching the first edition of Dr. Ram Prasad Memorial Workshop, a free soft skills and practice refinement workshop for medical doctors, Dr. Ravi Kumar observed that particularly the younger generation doctors are lacking the soft skills to deal with patients and many are adopting fast faced and mechanized practice while treating their patients.

“People skills can win doctors their jobs. But, these are very rare to find in a fast faced, mechanized practice environment of today. All the more, with advent of technology, it has made the doctors more mechanized and lacking human touch. To overcome this, we have initiated a small step to empower the doctor and patient relationship through free soft skills and practice refinement workshop for medical doctors,” noted Dr. Ravi Kumar.

Even though new technology and advancement in medical procedures have come into practice, the lack of proper communication between patient and doctor is increasingly becoming a stark reality. Ravi Kumar also says that a doctor’s non verbal communication is most important especially in case of cancer patients. “A doctor really needs to be more mature and must understand the patient’s psychology and communicate accordingly. “Particularly in cancer patients, the biopsy report is the mood changer and if doctor’s nonverbal communication on seeing biopsy is horrible, there are chances that the patient may collapse and lose all his hopes on life. People judge by our actions. Doctors need to control their emotions. Doctors have to be role models,” Dr Ravi Kumar stated.

According to Ravi Kumar, doctors having skills can achieve 85 per cent success rate, while remaining 15 per cent is achieved by their subject knowledge and technical skills. Doctors have remained doctors, but patients turned around and became consumers. Patients are shopping for doctors. Doctors need to treat patients with human touch, says Dr Ravi Kumar.

In the recently held free soft skills training programme more than 250 doctors from across the state took part at Ramprasad Memorial workshop and gained knowledge on various aspects of dealing with a patient during their medical practice. Such programmes help the doctors to understand patient psychology, patient communication, clinical etiquette, prescription writing, and avoiding litigation in practice, professional indemnity insurance, handling foreign patients, financial management & investments, taxation planning, time and stress management etc.