Video Transcript: Teaching Back Calvin Chou, MD; Professor, UCSF School of Medicine For the purposes of the end of the visit, it’s useful to engage the patient at the very end into the plan.
Physician: So, can we talk about your blood pressure then? Patient: Yes. Physician: You look a little scared of me now. Patient: Well, yeah. Physician: What’s the — what are you afraid of? Patient: I don’t know; it makes me nervous if it goes high because I have a history of high blood pressure. But I’ve been good with my medication.The teach-back is summarizing the entire visit. I used to do that summary myself, and what I found overtime is that if the patient does the summarizing for me, then they are more likely to do those things that we talked about in the visit.
Physician: I know I’ve spoken a lot about what the potential plan is today, and I’m wondering if you could repeat back to me what your understanding is of what the plan is. Patient: Uh, well, you’re going to give me antacid, and then, really, I’m just going to wait and see if the pain gets better, and also see if I develop diarrhea. If the pain is better and I don’t have diarrhea in a little while, we should know whether or not I can go home.So being able to summarize in a succinct way what’s going on and letting the patient do that is one of the things we feel is more effective to get everyone to the outcomes that they want and that they deserve.