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Medical practitioners, educators trained to effectively assess patients

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The Health Ministry under its Rural telemedicine project on Sunday conducted a suicide prevention webinar in an effort to provide medical practitioners and educators with crucial knowledge on how to assess suicide patients.
Several senior medical practitioners shared their knowledge with participants and discussed several key areas in assessing patients. Participants were also educated on several key terms used to assess patients such as aborted suicide, self-harm, suicidal intent etc.
One of the highlighted areas in which emphasis was placed was how to properly assess patients that would have attempted suicide, and in this regard, it was noted that it is important to form strong relationships with patients specifically to delve into if a patient has any suicidal ideations and identifying what is the root cause of these ideations.
Speaking at the webinar, Dr Sean Fredricks, highlighted that it is important to individualise care when dealing with suicide patients.
“It is good to individualise care, it’s not like an infection where as doctors were accustomed to just this one anti-biotic it’s going to most likely work for most of these infections,” he stated.
According to him, the reason one patient might want to end their life may vary from other individuals, who are seeking help.
He further noted that it is important to implement cultural humility according to Fredricks this is important because perspectives and norms may vary depending on where a patient resides “we need to have what is called cultural humility understanding that your perspective based on your perception of life, your upbringing, morality and so on. It’s different to varying degrees, it will be vastly different to somebody in region one compared to somebody in region six” he stated.
Participants were also lectured on what not to do when rapport building with patients. Rapport building is an important part of building relationships with patients as such practitioners were advised to not invalidate a patient’s feelings by saying statements such as “everybody experiences stress” similarly they were advised to give patients time to speak without interrupting and pay full attention when patients are speaking. These small gestures are said to make patients more comfortable when speaking allowing them to share more information which can be used to effectively treat and assess patients.

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