For Providers - Education & Risk Communication
The WRIISC's Education and Risk Communication (ERC) efforts have focused on providing education and training that will enhance knowledge of medically unexplained syndromes among key stakeholder groups. These groups include veterans with medically unexplained syndromes, veterans with deployment-related health care concerns but without current unexplained symptoms, Veterans Administration clinicians and the medical community at large, as well as WRIISC faculty and staff. At the same time, in collaboration with the DC WRIISC, the NJ WRIISC ERC team is working to evaluate the impact and effectiveness of the WRIISC clinical evaluations and to refine existing program evaluation tools.
Our center has adopted a healthcare paradigm that recognizes the importance of effective communication between healthcare providers and their patients. Specifically, our center encourages the use of effective communication in situations where concerns are high and/or trust is low and the subject is of a sensitive or controversial nature. Our healthcare team uses the basic principles of Risk Communication to guide us in disseminating information and in developing physician-patient communication techniques for healthcare providers to apply in helping patients with symptoms of no known medical cause.
Risk communication - like all healthcare provider interactions with those concerned about their health status or medical care - involves building and maintaining relationships of trust and providing opportunities for dialogue and a two-way exchange of information. If you are interested in the area of Risk Communication, you may want to pursue these Risk Communication links for providers.
In collaboration with the DC WRIISC, VA providers, as well as the medical community at large are being educated via WRIISC sponsored workshops and conferences, WRIISC speakers at non-WRIISC sponsored conferences, and publications of WRIISC faculty in medical literature. NJ WRIISC faculty and staff maintain and increase their knowledge about deployment-related health issues via participation in many educational programs coordinated by the NJ WRIISC ERC staff, which includes bi-weekly NJ WRIISC-sponsored seminars, journal clubs, and special NJ WRIISC in-service programs.
The NJ WRIISC offers a lunchtime seminar series targeted to clinicians and researchers. Click here to see this seminar schedule. In addition, we keep an up to date list of links to provider education resources and have also prepared fact sheets on deployment related health concerns and symptoms.
Links to: