A healthcare professional argues against giving patients fixed recovery timelines, which creates anxiety. Instead, set a specific timeframe with a range of expected improvement percentages to boost confidence and communication.
Never tell your patients how long it's going to take to get better. I know that sounds counterintuitive, but let me explain why. The way that most of us approach this topic when it comes to giving patients expectations about the recovery is we are trying to answer the question in our heads, well, how long would it take to get to 100%? And we're trying to then verbalize that to the patient. And that's tricky because there's variation in that, right? Like we can't know, is it going to take two months, three months, six months? Is it possible that they're going to have to have maintenance care to stay that way? These are all things going on for us and we're trying to give patients a concrete answer to that. When they say, how long is it going to take to get better? They want to, they want us to put a number on that. And the only way to do that accurately is to be vague is to kind of go, well, you know, like most people it's around three months, but that varies a little bit. You know, like it could be like five months. If this is going on. We go straight into like kind of mode. And as soon as we do that, we lose credibility, we lose authority, and the patient starts to go, oh, you don't really know. And that creates anxiety for them because they want to hear you say something concrete. They want to hear you not respond to that question with something vague. So the reason, you know, this is the reason why I say, don't actually try and answer the question, how long will it take to get 100% better? Now when I'm giving a report, a findings, I'm outlining a treatment plan, does that mean I just leave it open ended? No, of course not. We have to address the expectations. But this is a trick that I developed a while ago that works really, really well where we flip things around. I don't give them the expectation about how long it's going to take to get to 100. What I do is I give them something concrete, a set amount of time and I give them an idea of how much improvement I expect within that time. So let me flesh this out a little bit. Rather than saying, you know, getting this sorted is probably going to take, you know, around three months, maybe four or go. We'll start with this many times a week and then as you get better, we'll go weekly for, you know, maybe two or three weeks and then fortnightly for a couple. The longer you talk about the plan, the more kind of vague and Great. Gets the patience. Like, ah, this bit sounds certain. I don't know about the rest of this. That's one reason why they leave early as well is I flip it around and I say, right, let's talk about three months. And then within that three months I'm going to offer some flexibility about how things might go within those three months. So I would say to a patient, in terms of the overall recovery, what I expect is that over the next three months of us working together, all six weeks or two months or six months, whatever you happen to choose. But I tend to go three months. I see a lot of chronic patients, but I don't want to give six months or a year. As I always say over the next three months. What I expect is with us working together, we should get you 50 to 70% fully recovered within that time. 100% will take longer, but most of the work through us working together will be within those first three months. Or I might say, you know, over the next two months, I'm expecting to get you at least 80, if not 100% recovered. There may be a bit more work to do beyond that, but most of our work will be done within those two months. So I'm flipping it round here and I'm offering rather than saying, oh, getting to 100, I don't know the exact time, I'm saying, well, you know what, this amount of time, I don't know exactly where you'll be, but I'm giving an idea that doing it this way is actually much more reassuring for patients because I'm putting a start and end date on the plan. What people do not want is an open ended plan where it's like, ah, we might be here, we might be there, we might have to go longer. They want to know a start and end day. I've made it very clear that end doesn't mean goodbye, we're done. But I'm letting them know that most of our work is going to be within that time. They can then go, okay, I can plan on three months to get mostly there. Yes, there will be some work to do beyond that point. Yes, we may still see each other, but chances are the majority of our visits are going to be within that time there. Because by the time we get there, things are spacing out. So give this a try. When you're giving a report of findings, flip it round. Rather than saying, okay, the time is the fixed variable, sorry, the recovery rather is the fixed variable. The time is now variable that creates anxiety. Make the time the fixed variable. And now say exactly where there'll be. There'll be some variation there. And do it as a range. You know, I don't say I'm expecting 80%. I say 80 to 100 or, or 50 to 70 or 25 to 50. Just give them an idea. And they're not going to pin you down and say exactly where is it there? They just want to get a rough idea, but they want that start and end date. So stop telling patients when it will be 100%. Instead, tell them where you expect they'll be. Within a certain amount of time, it'll go much better. Patients will actually have more confidence, and it feels a lot easier for you to answer as well.
