Last month some of our players participated in a role play.
Role plays are a slight departure from our usual work, as instead of recreating an audience member’s story onstage, we are given a character and a situation which we then realize, for a particular scene or designated outcome. It’s a story, but with potentially more spontaneity and fluidity. In this role play our characters were ‘standardised patients’. This is a standard medical patient that a doctor might treat in real life. And although the patient was ‘standard’, the situation was potentially fraught as it involved harm and Open Disclosure.
Open Disclosure is a process for ensuring that open, honest, empathic and timely discussions occur between patients (and/or their support person) and a health care professional after a ‘patient safety’ incident. A patient safety incident is any unplanned or unintended event or circumstance which could have resulted, or did result, in harm to a patient. As actors, this is amazing work as we have to play extraordinarily emotionally charged scenes in a very authentic way. This potentially high-pressure conversation is a whole new skillset, for health care staff (doctors, nurses, specialists, admin) and patients, with the conversation being more collaborative, more personal, more empathetic – on both sides.
Research by Rick Iedema, and others, has proven that care is heightened, and litigation reduced, if medical staff provide honest and empathetic explanations of what actually happened, how to move forward and what’s been learnt by this. Playback Theatre Sydney initially collaborated with Professor Rick Iedema in 2009. Professor Edema had researched the topic of medical professionals talking to patients and families around errors that had occurred during their treatment and saw that discussions required a new level of relationship building and trust.
Since our initial video we’ve also worked with Medibank training doctors on the topic of Open Disclosure and we’ve just recently worked with the NSW Clinical Excellence Commission who brought out US trainers/ speakers as in the USA, this topic is more comprehensively integrated into medical staff training.
It’s relatively new in Australia and we’re excited to be working in this new field. We’re becoming specialists ourselves in role playing Open Disclosure and we’re happy to be supporting this new paradigm of collaborative conversations in the healthcare arena.
Access our 2009 training video showing the concepts of open disclosure in a more theatrical language and let us know if you’d like to use us in your role play for training, presentations, video or reenactments.