Encouraging Patients To Come to Therapy

One challenging area for me working in a Skilled Nursing Facility (SNF) is to encourage a patient to participate in therapy. Sometimes the person has a good reason for not wanting to do therapy such as leaving for the doctor or being ill. But sometimes a person just wants to be difficult or is not interested.

I know my grandmother was a difficult patient and was just belligerent at times because she could. The therapist had to use a lot of tricks in her bag to convince grandma to participate from strongly encouraging her, not asking and telling her to do therapy, not giving her any choices, bribing her with her favorite foods, or trying to get her to help someone else. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it did not.

My patient today sometimes can be difficult to convince to go to therapy, but once she is there she does everything asked of her. Today, I did not have any difficulty with her and she did everything I asked and made several choice about the activity. But I know I need to practice my persuasion skills incase she does decide not to go to therapy in the future.

Learning to be an OTA, I believe we all could use some ideas on how to persuade the patients. I have attached a link to the title on some tips about using persuasion skills for working with the elderly.