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A new review identified 10 healthcare communication practices that clinicians can use to create unhurried healthcare conversations with their patients.

Healthcare often requires unhurried conversations, but given clinicians’ time constraints, there may be confusion about how to conduct such discussions.

In a recent literature review for the Annals of Family Medicine, corresponding author Victor M. Montori, MD, and colleagues established 10 best practices for unhurried patient-clinician communication.

In an interview with Physician’s Weekly, Dr. Montori reflected, “Unhurried conversations are a marker of a healthcare system’s commitment to patient care, often over and above the usually singular focus on access, productivity, efficiency, and outcomes. Thus, they play a central role in the movement for bringing care into healthcare.”

The observable indicators of patient-clinician communication identified in the review are as follows:

Dr. Montori and colleagues pointed out that no single practice is enough on its own; instead, clinicians should find ways to use all ten.

The research team also developed the Unhurried Conversations Assessment Tool, which clinicians can use to perform self-assessments and enhance communication training. Clinicians can find more information about this tool in Patient Education and Counseling.

“The question throughout extant literature is not about whether (un)hurriedness matters: an entire body of literature suggests that it does,” Dr. Montori and colleagues wrote. “What had remained unsynthesized across disparate fields—what we have identified in this article—are the interrelated practices that clinicians and patients rely upon to co-construct unhurried conversations.”