The hArt of Medicine® workshops are designed to inspire, motivate and empower. With a strong focus on the therapeutic relationship, the skill of empathy and communication development, it centers its approach to improving the healthcare experience – for both the patient and the clinician – by engaging and empowering clinicians to rediscover their own ability to ‘make a difference’.

The program integrates five focus areas, with a strong emphasis on improving the clinician experience. The workshops are structured to promote new attitudes and to increase self-awareness, bringing insight and choices into how the clinician can positively influence their encounters with patients and colleagues.

The experiential and reflective exercises are designed to enlighten and motivate, providing the clinician with ideas, concepts and tools that are easily integrated into their practice. The personal and patient benefits they experience as a result of this new approach are sustained through the observational coaching and video simulation sessions.

Integrating the communication skills and core conditions into practice is a key component of the hArt of Medicine program. The focus of the observational coaching sessions is to help the clinician to appreciate their own behaviors and actions and how they may be influencing their encounters with patients and colleagues.

Utilizing a strengths-based, clinician-centered approach, the observational coaching sessions concentrate on exploring, with the clinician, their particular strengths, attributes and behaviors that lead to positive, therapeutic interactions. This particular approach promotes an encouraging and trusting environment that helps the clinician to appreciate their own actions and behaviors in the encounter and how this, in turn, influences the patient responses. Through increased self-awareness, the clinician is empowered and confident in their ability to direct and change an encounter.

The video simulation sessions are designed to create a collaborative, comfortable and positive learning environment where providers learn from each other. The video simulation and self-assessment format is a powerful tool where providers visually demonstrate and discuss tangible examples of communication competencies.

Utilizing a defined scenario that describes clinical presentations and personal ‘patient’ characteristics, the simulated encounters are purposefully not scripted. The simulation sessions are not designed to ‘teach’ what the participants should be doing, rather, by observing their own behaviors and language, as well as their colleagues’, an experiential learning environment is created – where participants learn from each other and experience the positive impact of adopting new communication techniques into an encounter.