How to Deal with Difficult Patients: Top Tactics for Healthcare Professionals

As a licensed nursing practitioner who has completed RN to MSN programs to qualify you to practice in medical settings, from time to time, you may come across difficult patients.

What is considered a difficult patient? At times, someone you are treating may become defensive, critical, or even, abusive. As a medical professional, it’s part of your role to remain calm, composed, and empathetic to diffuse the situation. In some cases, you may need to enlist the assistance of other professionals – such as language interpreters, for example – or perhaps, you might ask the patient’s family to become more actively involved in their treatment plan.

Let’s discuss.

Stay Calm, Composed, and Professional

When faced with agitated, stress-out, or emotionally distressed patients, it’s paramount for healthcare professionals to maintain their composure. This means remaining calm in the face of confrontation, criticism, or abuse. The key to this? Try not to take it personally. The patient may be particularly upset about their diagnosis, or they may not be receiving your updates about their recovery or treatment plan especially well. They may not be coping with their illness, and could also be in considerable physical discomfort – which can also impact us mentally and emotionally. 

For particularly agitated patients, healthcare workers can implement specific strategies recommended by the Project BETA framework. An acronym for ‘Best Practices in Evaluation and Treatment of Agitation’, the framework arms medical practitioners with recommended steps to diffuse especially violent patient situations.

Embrace Empathy 

What is empathy? Ultimately defined as the practice of putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, being empathetic requires us to see things from other peoples’ perspectives. 

Why is empathy essential in healthcare? When you work in the medical profession, you must be able to express genuine empathy for your patients. They will often be at their most vulnerable in terms of their health  – and you need to be able to validate this. Use language that expresses your concern and support for the patient’s health issues, and to reassure them that you genuinely care about their well-being. 

Acknowledge and Work Through Language Barriers

As a healthcare professional, you’ll be exposed to a range of culturally diverse patients – individuals from a variety of different ethnic backgrounds. The challenge? These patients may not be native English speakers, and as such, you may struggle to communicate with them effectively – especially about complex medical concepts. This can cause frustration to patients and healthcare practitioners alike. 

The key to overcoming this challenge? Endeavor to remain respectful while also using simple, easy-to-understand language. Of course, don’t take this too far – you don’t want to sound condescending. Failing this, and if you still can’t seem to understand each other, it may be necessary to engage the services of a language interpreter who is fluent in the patient’s native tongue, and who can accurately translate and relay information between you and the patient. 

Get the Patient’s Family Involved

A central component of being a healthcare professional is being able to build positive relationships with patients and their families. Keep the patient’s family in the loop by communicating with them regularly, and inviting them to appointments. 

Of course, you want to be sure not to step on your patient’s toes – this may enrage them further. Worse, it may cause them to mistrust you. Sensitivity is key here, as is treating your patient with the utmost respect at all times. 

Being a medical professional is not always easy. Doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers can at times be faced with particularly difficult patients. For this reason, they need to develop the necessary tools to be able to deal with these confronting situations. 

Some of these tools? Strategies such as maintaining calmness and composure in the face of criticism, abuse, and violence, cultivating empathy and respect towards patients regardless of their behavior, and engaging the assistance of other professionals like language interpreters, as well as getting the patient’s family involved, can be effective measures to take. 

Ultimately, being able to work through these challenging scenarios enables a healthcare worker to become stronger, more resilient, and perhaps most importantly, a well-rounded medical professional who is equipped to take on virtually any kind of patient.