Chatty Patients

While on my musculoskeletal prac I am treating an 80 year old man with subacromial impingment. He is extremely chatty and it is difficult to perform the subjective and objective examination as he tends to start talking about irrelevant things and it is hard to get a word in. This frustrated me as I only had a limited time for the assessment and wanted to keep him on topic. I wasn’t sure how to interrupt him once he started telling a story and get him back on track without seeming really rude. In the end I realised the only way to keep the examination and treatment running in a time efficient manner was to interrupt him from what he was saying with a question about his condition or telling him to do what I wanted from him. As the session went on it became clear that he didn’t seem to be offended by me interrupting him and then while I was performing hands on treatment he had an opportunity to talk about other things. I realised it is important to not let patients change the topic and talk about irrelevant things when I am trying to perform an assessment as we only have a limited amount of time with them and in the end they are there to get physio treatment. It is quite a common problem that patients will just want to have a chat, particularly with older patients as they may not have much other contact with people but we have to remember that they are there to be treated and we need to keep them on track to allow the assessment and treatment to be completed efficiently.