New Issues in Cognitive Counseling: Counseling Skills in Health Care

In their everyday activities, healthcare professionals use a wide range of counseling skills, mainly communication and relational skills. These skills are crucial for medical doctors, nurses, midwives, and physical and rehabilitation therapists for implementing preventive and supportive interventions concerning their patients’ health: to assist patients in stopping wrong habits and in changing those attitudes that prevent treatment adherence, to foster cooperation in treatment choice, to guide the patient’s decision in informed consent, to communicate adequately in difficult or critical situations, such as in breaking bad news (Buckman, 2011). Good relational attitudes and high levels of interpersonal sensitivity are also crucial for performing all those clinical activities to the highest level. Burnard (2005), in describing the counseling skills needed by health professionals, focuses his attention on three major areas: (a) listening and attending skills, that is, the ability of being truly focused on the other, consciously making ourselves aware of what the other person is saying; (b) client-centered skills, the set of skills and attitudes based on the assumption that the client is the best authority on her/his own experience, and that he/she is fully capable of changing and growing, but the changes need favorable conditions in which to bloom and blossom, conditions often lacking in crisis situations; and (c) helping with feelings skills, the set of techniques we may use to identify, explore, express, and regulate feelings and emotions. The first area is basically relational and involves a set of attitudes, the second and third are more “technical” as they imply the knowledge and the ability to use some practical skills to adequately explore the client’s subjective experience of facts and emotions. These skills can be taught and learned, just like any skills that can be disassembled into small discernible parts that can be easily assessed. On the contrary, attitudes can be only assessed in a global way and they are learned mainly from direct experience