BSCSPPD SELF REPORT 2017

Prepared by:
Shazreen Zafira Husseini Binti Shah Hazidi Husseini
(1001541846)
 Behavioural Sciences, Communication Skills and Personal & Professional
Development (BSCSPPD) classes for Year 2 has mostly taught me the importance of
maintaining a healthy mental state and developing crucial soft skills in preparation for the
years of becoming a doctor. Everything starts from within, and this can be applied to how
mental health truly affects how we function in our daily lives. It is a generally known fact that
to avoid getting sick, you need to eat healthy and exercise but all that ever does is just helping
you out externally (physically). How does one take care of ones self mentally and
emotionally? The answer is, knowing how to live life as stress-free as possible. Everyone
experiences stress but not letting it get to you and bring you down is the key to improving
your mental health. Chronic stress affects our immune system, which becomes weaker and
less resistant to external problems that threaten our organisation. Therefore, by knowing how
to manage stress, we can indirectly improve our physical health as well.

Being a doctor is not just knowing the facts like knowing how to diagnose a patient
and how to treat them; it is also about having the ability to easily form relationship and gain
trust, then maintain that relationship and keep that trust. Doctors meet new patients almost
every day and if they do not have the social skills to communicate with people they just met
and earn their trust, how are they able to get the patient comfortable and confide in them
about the problems they are having? Even if the doctor is very good at his or her job
knowledge-wise, the patient will not be able to completely put his or her trust and faith in the
doctor, and therefore, not comply and follow through with the treatment and medication
prescribed.

A good doctor-patient relationship is when there is kindness or unconditional positive

regard, empathy, effective listening, openness and honesty, reliability and continuity,
communication skills, fairness and justice, competency, knowledge, professionalism and
ethics, and is patient-centred. By showing empathy, having good communication skills and
effective listening, doctors gain the patients trust and confidence towards them. Effective
listening also helps a lot in building therapeutic relationship. Being honest in this case means
giving the patient sufficient information so that he or she can understand the nature of any
proposed treatment, its implications and risks and the consequences of not undergoing the
treatment. This will help them decide on whether or not to continue with the treatment or not.
By doing this, doctors are giving the patients their rights and treating them as equal partners
in the doctor-patient relationship, rather than forcing the treatment on to the patients. While
practicing medicine, professionalism and ethics play a huge part in how we treat the patients.
The four basic principles of medical ethics are respect for autonomy, beneficence, non-
maleficence and justice. Patients should be able to make decisions over their own treatments,
and the treatments should improve the condition of the patients, remove the patients pain and
not harm them.

In the medical field, knowing the right thing to say helps doctors in doing their job a
lot, making it much easier. The trick to knowing what to say and what not to say is having
good communication skills, empathy and sensitivity. This skill is especially important when
breaking bad news to a patient or the patients family. Doctors must try to see in the patients
perspective, how hard they have been struggling with their disease and how hard they have
been trying to hold on to that last small sliver of hope which is the doctors excellence to try
to heal them, only to discover that they cannot be saved. The combination of those three
qualities is what is going to determine how the patient reacts to the news. Doctors should also
understand the grieving process of the patient and not aggravate them more to avoid them
from doing something foolish.

In addition to knowing how to deliver terrible news, good communication skills and
sensitivity also help doctors in dealing with patients regarding issues about sex. This is
especially important when dealing with teenagers, who are still figuring out and exploring
their sexuality. Teenagers are often curious creatures. A lot of changes are happening inside
and to their body so they need someone who can explain all that and provide them with all
the necessary information. Parents should be able to tactfully handle the confusing and
awkward questions that they receive from their growing pubescent children. When parents
fail to do that (possibly because they are uncomfortable with discussing about sex with their
children), this can lead to many problems because the teenagers will then rely to the only
other people they trust the most: their friends. Getting mixed up with the wrong type of
friends might cause said teenager to get involved in sexual behaviours and/or activities and
this is where doctors play a major part. If the teenager is not practicing safe sex, he or she can
get infected with a sexually transmitted disease or she could get pregnant. So, when they go
see a doctor about it, the doctor should approach the issue as thoughtfully and carefully as
possible as the teenager might be embarrassed to talk about it. This is where good
communication skills come in handy.

Another important thing BSCSPPD has taught me during this year is developmental
psychology. Developmental psychology is the study of human growth and development over
the lifespan, including physical, cognitive, social, intellectual, perceptual, personality and
emotional growth. For a very long time, experts thought that development only happened up
to a certain point. Once a person reached adulthood, psychologists believed, they were pretty
much done with growth and change. However, this is wrong because changes keep happening
in our body every day in our lives. Infants are not as developed in motor and speech skills as
toddlers are and five-year-olds are not as experienced in life as adults are. Also, if we
compare the elderly to adults, for example, their vision is not as sharp their younger
counterparts are. As you can see, changes happen at every point in our lives. Knowing this
can help us better understand how people grow, develop and adapt at different life stages. We
can also apply this knowledge to help people overcome developmental challenges and reach
their full potential.

As a conclusion, BSCSPPD helped a lot in making me realize what being a good

doctor truly means. A good doctor is not just passing the exams and getting a job at a
hospital; it is being able to help patients as competently, compassionately and conveniently as
possible. It helped me realize my flaws and motivated me to improve myself so that I can
become a better me, before becoming a doctor.
 REFERENCES

1. Figures, H. (2017, January 30). Psychosomatic: Everything starts from the mind mental
health ? Retrieved May 01, 2017, from http://www.healthyfigures.org/psychosomatic-
everything-starts-from-the-mind-mental-health/
2. (n.d.). Retrieved May 01, 2017, from http://study.com/academy/lesson/overview-of-life-
span-developmental-psychology.html
3. Ottawa, I. M. (n.d.). Retrieved May 01, 2017, from
https://www.med.uottawa.ca/sim/data/Ethics_e.htm
4. 3 Techniques for Good Grief Counselling. (2016, October 06). Retrieved May 01, 2017,
from http://www.unk.com/blog/3-grief-counselling-techniques/
5. Merrick, J., Tenenbaum, A., & Omar, H. A. (2013). Human Sexuality and Adolescence.
Retrieved May 01, 2017, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3859969/