Top 5 De-escalation Skills Your Healthcare Staff Needs

More than 40% of healthcare workers experience verbal abuse from patients and visitors at least once throughout their careers.

(World Health Organization)

Complex patient situations and grievances can happen at any time at your practice, catching your staff off-guard and making them feel demoralized.

The key to protecting your healthcare staff is to train them on de-escalation skills.

Here are the top five skills you must train your team with so they can be prepared to de-escalate situations on any occasion:

Five Crucial De-escalation Skills For Healthcare Staff

1. Quick Judgment And Decision-making

• Recognizing a patient’s agitation and its severity
• Thinking on your feet on the next course of action
• Efficient response instead of rapid reaction

Patient situations are highly time-sensitive, requiring effective, rapid resolution in case the situation goes out of control.

Your healthcare staff should be able to identify when the patient is becoming agitated and the severity of their agitation. This enables them to anticipate any developments in their behavior and respond promptly.

Response time is not the only factor, however. Simply reacting can lead to rash decisions that only aggravate the situation. Instead, focus on responding efficiently after careful consideration among immediate team members.

2. Working Under Pressure

• Avoiding reciprocating the patient’s emotional state
• Utilizing neutral, unassuming language and gestures
• Stress management

Depending on the severity of the patient’s complaint, the feeling of pressure may permeate among your staff. They must manage their emotions effectively, as fervently reacting or reciprocating the patient can worsen the situation. This can also affect the patient experience, making other patients question the integrity and capacity of your clinic to address complex situations.

Your staff can speak slowly and clearly while using unprovocative body language to remain helpful to the patient. Internally, they can learn breathing techniques and other tactics that promote focus and composure during the heat of the moment.

3. Empathy And Understanding

• Patient-centered care
• Actively listening to resolve and support
• Acknowledging what the patient says

De-escalation involves more than stopping the current situation before it becomes beyond repair — it entails establishing understanding and common ground with the aggrieved patient.

Applying patient-centered care is vital to instilling the value of empathizing and understanding the patient to meet their needs. It involves actively listening and acknowledging their concerns while identifying a direct resolution that satisfies both the patient and the clinic.

However, you must also be able to manage the patient’s expectations with realistic, fair, and attainable options. Overpromising and underdelivering can lead to further frustration.

4. Communicating With The Patient

• Maintaining eye contact while speaking with the patient
• Asking questions for information and clarification
• Working with other staff to identify a solution

Communicating with the patient is a critical component of de-escalation. It involves using specific words and phrases to scale down the situation and acquire information about the patient.

One crucial aspect that your healthcare staff must practice is consistent eye contact. This simple but effective technique allows your team to get along more successfully with difficult patients by making them feel acknowledged.

Another vital skill is asking the patient questions to gather information or clarify their concerns. While it may take some time to identify a resolution despite how many questions you ask, it will at least let the patient know that they’re being accommodated, which helps alleviate the situation ever so slightly.

Further, your staff should be able to communicate with each other seamlessly about the patient’s grievances so that a solution can be identified more efficiently.

5. Applied Knowledge Of Workplace Protocols

• Knowing pertinent workflow processes related to patient grievances
• Chain of command for managing complaints
• Documentation for future reference

De-escalation is highly relative not only to every patient but also to each practice. Every clinic has its own way of dealing with certain matters or aspects of patient care and daily operations. In the case of de-escalation, while the desired outcome is always the same regardless of practice, how it’s achieved can differ.

Teaching your healthcare staff about your clinic’s specific processes for dealing with patient grievances is essential. This will let them know what to do if all else fails and who to contact if the situation gets out of hand.

Documenting patient situations can also be helpful, as it allows you to gain insights into why certain patients behaved in the way they did and how you can prevent or resolve them in the future.

How To Train Your Healthcare Staff On De-Escalation Skills

Patient de-escalation requires sufficient time and structure to teach among healthcare staff. Regardless of how frequently your clinic deals with aggrieved patients, preparing your team for such situations will benefit your operations in the long run.

Here are five effective ways you can train your healthcare staff on de-escalation skills:

1. Regular workshop sessions – Educating your team on patient situations and how to de-escalate them can spread awareness about those issues. It also prepares them to tackle and de-escalate actual patient encounters in the future.
2. Role-playing activities – Simulating patient situations gives your team a glimpse of how they can deal with aggrieved patients and practice the de-escalation techniques they learned during training.
3. One-on-one coaching – Individualized training is a more far-reaching method than general training. It enables you to address specific weak points each staff member may have when facing a difficult patient. This also gives each staff member an avenue to voice their grievances, allowing you to build rapport among your healthcare team.
4. Distributing literature on de-escalation – Sending flyers, posters, and other materials, whether printed or online, can help your team stay informed about how to deal with difficult patient situations.
5. Team support system – According to a 2023 study on the perceived quality of work life in a healthcare environment, staff burnout has increased from 11.6% to 19%, partly due to patient violence. Extending support to staff who have experienced complicated situations with patients can significantly improve their well-being and allow them to address future similar encounters more effectively.

Integrating de-escalation into your healthcare front desk training protocols secures your team’s safety and well-being, which is crucial to their success and that of your practice.

Learn To De-Escalate So You Can Elevate Your Practice

Preparing your team for the worst safeguards them from potential risks to their morale and performance. Regardless of whether or not you can resolve every difficult patient situation, always extend your support to your team and remind them that you will all overcome every challenge together.

Standing at the frontline of your clinic’s operations, your front desk staff are highly vulnerable to patient grievances. Learn how WelcomeWare’s video receptionist platform and patient intake solutions can transform them into virtual lobby receptionists who can cover multiple locations in the safety of their homes or in a centralized location, helping streamline the patient experience in the process.