Breaking bad news to patients

Hilary Maher, Education into Practice Adviser at the Irish Hospice Foundation, explores the complex communication challenge facing doctors about to deliver that piece of bad news to patients, as the Hospice launches a new information video on YouTube for medical professionals. It’s not a part of the job that any doctor relishes. Breaking bad news to patients can be stressful, no matter how often it’s done. Stressful, that is, both for the doctor and for the patient. It is difficult to get an exact figure of how many hundreds of times bad news is broken within Irish healthcare on a…