Therapeutic communication: a lifespan approach

This text stresses the importance of developing students’ therapeutic communication skills to equip them for health care practice. Therapeutic Communication: A lifespan approach consists of three parts. Part 1: Preparing for Practice, introduces theories of communication and provides a theoretical foundation for problem-based learning. Part 2: Healing and Caring and Part 3: The Wider Dimensions of Healing and Caring focus on clinical practice where students are encouraged to work through scenarios that not only involve a ‘patient’ but also the significant others who live and work within the patient’s environment. These scenarios encourage students to review and develop their communication skills, focusing for example on their listening skills, their approaches to questioning, and to opening and closing of conversations to achieve maximum information exchange in a variety of clinical situations.