Do you hold yourself accountable to your patients?

Hey, guys, it's Chris. And today's a quick video, a little bit of a challenge for you to see if you're really holding yourself accountable to your patients. Also, I'm going to be a little bit vulnerable and share a bit of feedback I've been getting, and it's not all universally positive, so I'm a little nervous about today, but let's just dive and see how it goes. So I wanted to talk a bit about whether you hold yourself accountable to your patient standards or whether you're all talk. Because it's all very well and good, us saying to our patients we're great or telling them they're doing better or whatever it is, but unless we can actually back that up with some sort of evidence, it doesn't count for much. We all know talk is cheap. Everyone can say anything about themselves. Everyone's out there online shouting about how great they are. If we really want to stand apart from the crowd and we want to show that we're an ethical, patient centered practitioner, then we need to make sure that we are holding ourselves accountable to, to them and their results. And a way this often comes up is during the review. Now, hopefully, most of the time when you do a review with patients, they're getting better and they're usually happy and making progress and all that's great and, you know, hopefully that's the same for you too. I know it's true for most of us. However, we all have patients, myself included, who aren't getting better as quickly as they would like. They get to the review and they're not really happy and loving it. They're a bit frustrated or worried or concerned and they're feeling a little unsure. They maybe don't know if they want to continue with care. And what we need to make sure we do there is show to them that we are holding ourselves and our treatment accountable, that we're not just telling them it's going to get better because that will be their worries. Are you just going to keep saying, stick with it, stick with it, stick with it whilst they're paying money and time and not getting the results they want. So we need something to hold ourselves accountable to now. There's different things you can do. Questionnaires are a great way of doing this. So I'm a big fan of the Bournemouth questionnaire. Get them to fill that out when they first see you and then at the review and then you can show them some changes or potentially you could even look at what is the movement they want to be able to do again, what's the activity? Are you checking that what you don't want to do, and I see loads of chiropractors doing this, is fall back on your examination and say, well, I know you're not feeling better and I know you still can't really get out of bed and get dressed by yourself. But look, your forbear test is better and your straight leg raise is no longer cause causing pain and Kemp's test isn't actually positive either. And we fall back on that to try and demonstrate this progress being made. And it may be worth pointing that out to the patient. But I've got to tell you, if that is your accountability, that is doctor centered care, because your patient does not care about your exam findings. I say this to chiropractors all the time when I work with them on the course that during the initial examination those findings are for you, they're not for the patient. The patient doesn't really care. They just want to know that you've done the tests. You need to know what to do next so you can tell them, well, look, your tests are improving and that's showing progress. But don't make that the reason that you're going to make certain recommendations or why you're not worried because the patient's going to go, I'm not coming here to get better orthopedic tests. I'm not coming here to improve my reflexes. I'm coming here because I want to get out of bed and get dressed in the morning pain free. So all those things, it can be worth pointing that to the patient. But you need to acknowledge that that's not the ultimate outcome they're looking for. But if we can do that and things like, again, questionnaires can be great for this because you can show them the change. Things like care response are brilliant for this. It's a completely free tool and it will graph the changes in their Bournemouth questionnaire or their outcome questionnaire. So you can say, look, your score was a 79, now you're down to a 46. That's improvement because that's relevant to them. Those questions are about the impact the pain is having on their life. It's much more patient centered that way. So when we're conducting our reviews, we want to make sure that we are holding ourselves accountable. Now I'm going to show you something today and this is for me, this is my accountability. This is me showing you that I hold myself to a standard as well. And I'm a little bit nervous because I'M going to show you feedback I've gotten and some of it is the kind of stuff I wouldn't necessarily ordinarily share some. So this is for the PLT webinars I do on communication. So I train all the PLT candidates in the UK on their communication skills at the moment. And what's great about this from my perspective is the RCC asks them to fill out questionnaires completely anonymously afterwards and they get quite a bit of data and they share that with me. So I get this anonymous feedback to see how I'm doing. I'm going to show you some of that that I've got for the last three. So. So you can see here, these are the ones I have this first one, this was back in October and you can see here, looking really nice. So nine or ten out of ten in terms of how effective was I during that webinar, which is lovely to see. They've got some nice comments below and which words would they select that were relevant to it? And they're all nice words. Interesting, useful, enjoyable, worthwhile. That was a really lovely one. The next one, this was back in February and again so 8 or 10 was scoring there. So happy with that. I can demonstrate to you. Look, I am actually effective at doing these as well. Some nice comments here and again, enjoyable, exciting, useful. So some really good feedback there. The most recent one, this was back in May, that I'll show you. So again, 8, 9, 10 in terms of effectiveness, that was great to see. They will say somebody thought I didn't allow much opportunity for questions. What. Which surprised me a little bit, but I've taken that on board and the next one I do, I'm going to make sure that I emphasize that more because I might feel like I left opportunity for questions, but if they didn't feel it doesn't matter what I think there. So you got the comments there. This one sticks with me. Lots of nice things they ticked Somebody put tedious. It was one out of. I think we had 13 responses in total. And yes, the rest of it's really lovely and I'd love to focus on the positives, but it's if you're like me, you probably know this little bit of imposter syndrome going on in the back of my head and you can hear loads of great things all day. You hear this one thing, that's the one that sticks with you. So a little uncomfortable sharing this because tedious is not a word you ever want to hear about a webinar or a course that you've done there. But, yeah, in all honesty, I'm not, you know, I'm not everybody's cup of tea. And not everyone is going to take what I would like them to take out of this. And perhaps it was tedious for this one person. This was the bigger sample. We had 13 here. The others were smaller, sort of five or six. So overall, that's about 5% of people. I'm okay if 95% of people didn't find me tedious, but I wanted to share that with you to show that I do this as well. I do this with my communication, I do this with my patients. And it's okay to share things that aren't going perfectly. It's okay if the feedback that you are getting from the patient isn't universally positive, as long as you're honest and open about that, that you don't try to hide it. If I'd shown you these and gone, yeah, somebody said tedious, but whatever, they're having a bad. Tried to brush past it, you would probably go, hang on a minute, Chris. Like, you can't just brush that under the rug. And it's the same with our patients. When we get feedback that maybe isn't positive, we need to look at why that is, and we need to look at what we could maybe improve in that relationship. But however you're doing it, I would really encourage you, hold yourself accountable. Your patients will love it, they will respect you more, they'll be better at following your advice. They're more likely to stick with you because you'll demonstrate to them that you're an ethical, honest practitioner who's transparent about things and you're not just trying to convince them to keep coming or trying to make everything seem fine with time. So give that a go. Whether you use questionnaires or not. If you want to, I would highly recommend looking at care response. The Bournemouth questionnaires are such a simple one to use. Or just check in with them. What's the most important movement they want to get back. Check that during the review, see if you can find a way of quantifying it. So give that a go, as always. Any questions, let me know. The other thing to say very quickly is that if you would like to work with me, the Happy Patient Project is now open for enrollment. If you go to patientcenter.co.uk hpp you can find all the details for the course there. That's open. It's a distillation of all the training I've done for years and years. And years. I've done my best to make sure it isn't tedious, but if you go in it and you start watching it and you go, ah, Chris, this isn't for me. You're not my cup of tea. Refund within 30 days. Absolutely no problem. So hopefully you're part of the 95% who didn't find that. And I'm working all the time to make it more engaging, more enjoyable, so that it can really help you get better results with your patients, better outcomes and more referrals and fewer complaints as well. So if that's something you're interested, you want to work with me on that, then go to the site there. Any questions, as always, just shoot me a message. Otherwise, I'll see you soon for the next video.