Making patients feel understood at the pharmacy counter-the act of communicating based on heightened awareness of emotional states

Background In 2021, a new post-curriculum education in Denmark and the Netherlands was created specifically for community pharmacy counseling which rests on mentalizing theory. The psychoeducation trains staff’s ability to be in the three specific emotions simultaneously: acceptance, serenity, and interest when communicating with a patient at the pharmacy counter as these emotions are the foundational emotions for secure attachment, i.e., creating a trustful relationship, to promote patient-centered care. Through standardized tests it has been demonstrated that participation led to a significant increase in pharmacy staffs’ levels of emotional awareness. However, how staff translate these theoretical learnings about emotional states into specific acts of patient-centeredness in real desk encounters, is still uncertain.
Purpose To explore whether pharmacy staff change their interactional behavior toward more patient centredness during community pharmacy desk meetings after participating in the new post-curriculum psychoeducation focusing on emotional awareness and mentalizing communication, and if so, how.
Method Before and after their participation in the new education, 28 pharmacy staff video-recorded 3-5 of their own pharmacy desk meetings. A mixed method design integrating Conversation Analysis and descriptive quantitative analysis of the recorded interactions, was used to assess if staff in these meetings managed to translate their acquired theoretical emotional awareness into patient-centered acts, and if so, what types of interactional mechanisms were applied.
Findings Overall, pharmacy staff displayed an altered orientation towards patients after participation in the post-curriculum education, as they produced more questions in their first and third position talk-turns post-intervention, as well as doing this by increasing the use of pronoun interrogative questions, i.e., questions inviting patients’ perspectives to be elaborated. Staff likewise reduced the provision of information without it first being preceded by a question from the patient. Furthermore, the realizations of staff third position contributions in post-intervention measures displayed a heightened orientation towards patients’ perspectives through use of ‘continuers’, ‘posing questions including aspects from the patients’ previous answer’, ‘formulations’, and ‘providing information related to patients’ answers’, along with ‘affective evaluation’, all interactional mechanisms supporting more patient engaging interactions.
Conclusion Through participation in a psychoeducational post-curriculum education, pharmacy staff displayed an altered interactional behavior in pharmacy encounters toward more patient-centered communication approaches. This contributes to the field of research concerning competency training of healthcare professionals and adds weight to the notion that social relational-building skills can be affected through relevant psychoeducation training.