Hi guys,
Im at the Burns ward and I found that several patients were aggressive. One of the reasons is that several of them were smokers and/or used illicit drugs. My supervisor had warned me and went through a tutorial about dealing with difficult patients (which was really very helpful).
Knowing that I would be a having an unusually verbally aggressive patient, my supervisor took me through my first session with that man. Although the man seemed very keen in the beginning, he did seem to get agitated as the session went on. The man kept on asking repeatedly how the assessment would help him and how physiotherapy would help (even if we answered him with the necessary reasons).
What made it even more difficult was his lack of compliance with the medical treatment. He started to become aggressive (passively at first) and then yelled out that he was going to discharge himself against medical advise.
This is the point when my supervisor said no and we took him back to the room. She said that she felt very cornered in by the patient and had no room for her to run, had the patient lost control and physically become violent (could sense it with his agitation).
Hence, it's important to watch out for some warning signals before we keep trying to persuade a patient about how important physiotherapy is for them. We can only persuade them to a certain extent. At the end of the day, they will be making their own decisions.
I guess this has been an incident to realise the above.
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I have been in a similar situation with an aggresssive patient before and was not quite sure how to handle it. I think that a tute on how to handle aggressive patients like the one your supervisor gave you would be beenficial to all of us. Teh patient I had started getting angry and yelling obscenities to get his way. He was a long term ETOH user and this increased his aggitation. I did not know how to handle the situation so i just termionated treatment and left the room.
The next day I went in and tried a different approach, I was more empathetic and tried to work formt eh angle that "I know it seems silly but I have to do it so please help me out". this appraoch seemd to work alot better. Making out that you are frinds with them.
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