Patient Practitioner Interaction: An Experiential Manual for Developing the Art of Health Care

Over 20 years ago, Dr. Carol M. Davis created the path for teaching health care professionals how to develop self-awareness and communication skills critical to providing ethical, compassionate, and professional treatment and care to their patients.

That path is Patient Practitioner Interaction: An Experiential Manual for Developing the Art of Health Care, now in its Fifth Edition.

While the ways of communication have evolved over the last 23 years, the face-to-face role of the practitioner and patient has not. With technology having a large presence in health care, the personal interaction and comfort provided by the health care professional serves an even more important purpose in facilitating healing with therapeutic presence.

Patient Practitioner Interaction, Fifth Edition begins with chapters that assist students in self- awareness and understanding of their own history in developing their values and communication skills. This then guides the student into learning how to differentiate personal values from professional values.

In the remaining chapters, Dr. Carol M. Davis and her contributors take Patient Practitioner Interaction, Fifth Edition into the heart of the text: teaching actual skill development in communicating with patients, as well as skills in diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. The updated exercises at the end of each chapter encourage an essential element in the inculcation of these fundamental skills—reflection and personalization of the material to one’s own story.

New in the Fifth Edition:
A new chapter on communicating about spirituality that teaches health care professionals to better assess the needs of patients and families dealing with hope, faith, and despair
New material on communicating in the information age
A reorganization of the chapters, contemporary terminology, and references
New and updated exercises at the end of each chapter in the book
A companion website that includes the chapter exercises—available with new textbook purchase
Updated instructors material for faculty use in the classroom


Instructors in educational settings can visit www.efacultylounge.com for additional material to be used for teaching in the classroom.

From the Foreword by Dr. Helen J. Hislop:
“The author and contributors have made the topic not just a walk through social and personal issues and professional and personal behaviors, they have encased it in a scientific format of mainstream humanity, within each individual, between a caregiver and a care receiver, between friends or adversaries. Even more notably, Dr. Davis has provided health professionals with a road map to personal growth and worth and a source of human behavior that will engender faith, trust, and open and honest interactions between patients and therapists—in short, a thesaurus and encyclopedia of the sacred trust that must exist for a successful humanitarian experience in the health care arena.”

Patient Practitioner Interaction: An Experiential Manual for Developing the Art of Health Care, Fifth Edition by Dr. Carol M. Davis is the answer to every curriculum’s need to develop effective interpersonal professional behavior in their students.