Communicating Diagnoses with Patients

In my recent placement, I had a patient that has been an inpatient for almost a week already. At the end of one of our sessions, he told me that he’s really thankful that all of his doctors, nurses and other health professionals have been doing their best to help him and he has been feeling better for the past days. However, he also said that he wished someone would tell him what has been causing his problems. He said he’s already asked the doctors and nurses but all of them did not say a thing to him at all and that made him anxious. It was quite obvious at that point that he was going to ask me what’s been happening to him so I was having a little bit of a think what to say to him. To start with, he does not have a definite diagnosis just yet, but in his notes, there were some things that the doctors have been trying to rule out. I kept thinking if telling him the possible diagnoses would be of benefit to him. He was somehow anxious then so I had to take that into consideration. In the end, I made it clear to him that there were some possible things that the doctors are trying to rule out. I told him what those were and he said he was relieved because at least he has an idea of the possibilities. Again, I told him that those are just possibilities and the diagnosis can be something else other than those, but he was satisfied already. At that point, I wasn’t so sure if I had done the right thing. So off I went to talk to my supervisor and she said usually, it is not up to us (physios) to discuss diagnoses with patients but that she thought I handled the situation well. She also said that such situations should be approached carefully and with a great deal of sensitivity because each patient is different from another and they may very well respond differently to such situations.