The effects of graphic feedback and goal setting on verbal communication with patients in a psychiatric care unit

Abstract

Treatment in psychiatric care involves many components, one of which is staff-patient interaction. Communication between staff and patients in inpatient psychiatric care can increase the chances of developing a positive therapeutic relationship, which strongly predicts the treatment’s success. Nevertheless, often the emphasis in psychiatric care is on medical duties rather than interpersonal and social skills. This can lead to the patients using other ways to interact, and sometimes those ways are considered undesirable both to the patients and those around them. The present study used a non-concurrent multiple baseline design to examine the effects of graphic feedback and goal setting on verbal communication between staff and patients in an inpatient psychiatric care unit. The intervention was effective in increasing the target behaviors for all four participants. Additionally, the participants communicated more with the patients overall following the intervention. Lastly, the intervention indirectly affected the patients who started seeking out communication with the participants more frequently. This study gives an idea of an intervention that is relatively easy to perform, is not time-consuming, and has a significant impact. More research is needed to further disentangle the effects of graphic feedback and goal setting to see if showing the participants their data more frequently enhances the effects of the intervention, and to examine the effects of only showing the lecture to the participants.