One of the topics that I’ve written about is maintaining the human connection in medicine, and never forgetting that solid communication is at the core of all we do in healthcare.

Pre-coronavirus, the main barriers I saw to this were shrinking face-to-face time with patients, burdensome electronic medical records, skyrocketing bureaucracy, and a lack of educational reinforcement among all medical professionals.

Communication skills, including active listening and displaying empathy, are very teachable to anyone.

While you can probably never turn a bad communicator into an amazing one, each one of us can always go up a few rungs on the skills ladder.