Medical Improv: Improving Patient & Provider Outcomes

For a system that carries high prestige, holds incredible importance, and invokes “patient-centered care” as a motto, all parties involved - patients, doctors, and administrators alike -  frequently report high levels of dissatisfaction and stress. 

Patients report dissatisfaction with providers, administrators battle with reimbursements and staffing challenges, and doctors take the brunt of long-hours, high expectations, and clients who don’t follow their prescribed treatment - just to name a few challenges. 

 It isn’t hard to extrapolate how the stress and sometimes misaligned needs of all parties collide to perpetuate communication misfires, disconnection, and dissatisfaction. In response, Medical Improv has emerged as an experiential training tool to improve the core fundamentals of medical communication, improve patient satisfaction, decrease burn out, reduce malpractice claims, expand interdisciplinary collaboration, and improve patient outcomes. 

If you’re thinking it sounds too good to be true, stay with me for a few more paragraphs. Superficially, it may be hard to see the connection between Improv Theatre and medicine, but they have more in common than they initially appear to.

HOW IT WORKS:

In improv theatre, players take the stage to co-create characters, dialogue, and entire stories on the spot without pre-planning.  In order to do this successfully, players must skillfully attune to their scene partners while remaining keenly present. While in this state of rapport, players deeply listen for the information their partner(s) are providing them through both verbal and non-verbal offers, and then they respond in kind.  Information is rapidly exchanged, and a story unfolds.  Skillful improvisers make this process look like magic.  Broken down, what we’re seeing is players who are deeply in sync.  They have learned to remain present, respond spontaneously, pick-up offers from their scene partners, adapt on the fly, and to take just the right amount of risk.  

By now, you may be seeing how improv and medicine are closely paralleled.  Doctors and improvisers are asked to complete many of the same tasks - flexibly adapt in a shifting environment, connect with others, effectively share information, check for understanding, build rapport…the list goes on.  Harnessing the tools required for successful improvisation can be a boon to healthcare professionals who often face increasing expectations and concurrently decreasing resources.

At Yes And Brain, we use medical improv blended with interpersonal communication tactics derived from years of clinical practice to support medical professionals with tools that make their lives easier, while simultaneously improving patient care and outcomes.  While medical improv is a relatively new educational strategy, research to support it continues to expand.

For example, a review published in November 2018 supported the conclusion that “improvisational theatre as applied to health professional trainings is an innovative educational strategy that can foster the development of professional knowledge, skills, and attitudes outlined in the CanMEDS 2015 (Frank et al.2015) competency framework.”  Specifically, their findings support using improv to support medical professionals in acquiring at least six of the seven CanMEDS roles - medical expert, communicator, collaboration, professional, leader, and scholars.  

Other decade’s old research supports the idea that doctors with fewer malpractice claims more frequently engage in communication behaviors such as rapport building, checking for understanding, laughing more, and encouraging patients to share - all skills directly taught and practiced through medical improv.

Medical Improv Trainings through Yes And Brain teach skills that make both professionals’ and patients’ lives better. Everyone wins.

Interested in a Medical Improv Training? Get in touch! We’d love to talk with you!