Dealing with Difficult People Course for Doctors, Nurses and Other Healthcare Professionals

The course combines an understanding of why difficult interactions develop with practical approaches you can use to manage them. Through discussion, exercises and application to workplace situations, you will explore:

• Why people can be difficult to work with. Understand how personality, motivation, perception and different communication styles influence working relationships, as well as recognising your own assumptions, preferences and triggers.
• How to have difficult conversations. Learn how to prepare for conversations that might otherwise be avoided, decide what really needs to be addressed and discuss problematic behaviour without unnecessarily attacking or blaming the individual.
• How to give constructive feedback. Explore practical frameworks including SBI (Situation–Behaviour–Impact), alongside approaches that help you distinguish between an isolated incident, a recurring pattern and a more fundamental problem within a relationship.
• How conflict develops and escalates. Understand different forms of workplace conflict, recognise common triggers and distinguish healthy professional disagreement from conflict that is beginning to damage relationships or team functioning. How to respond to conflict more effectively. Explore approaches including the Thomas-Kilmann model to understand your instinctive response to conflict and consider when competing, collaborating, compromising, accommodating or avoiding may be appropriate.
• How to communicate more assertively. Recognise the differences between passive, aggressive and assertive communication, become more comfortable expressing your position and learn practical approaches to saying no, establishing boundaries and responding to criticism.
• How interactions can become stuck. Use ideas from Transactional Analysis and other behavioural models to recognise unhelpful patterns of communication and consider how changing your own response can alter the interaction.
• How to listen and question more effectively. Explore how language, questioning and active listening can reduce defensiveness, uncover what is actually driving a disagreement and help move a difficult conversation towards a constructive outcome.

The aim is not to give you a script for every difficult conversation. Different people and situations require different approaches. Instead, the course gives you a range of frameworks and techniques and helps you develop the judgement to decide when and how to use them.