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Asking Difficult Questions and the Assessment Process

The screening, triage and assessment processes can be gruelling for both work and client – there can seem to be a never ending list of pointless questions that have varying degrees of pertinence to the task in hand.
This course looks at the practical skills of shaping questions in a way that gives the client the necessary information they need to decide the information they want to share in a way that feels secure for them. It looks at the context of the questions being asked and provides an opportunity to consider practical strategies to address barriers.
Some of the questions may be unpleasant to answer and embarrassing to ask. Common situations that workers may have problems include:

• Finding out about the client’s sexual history
  • Asking the client to define their ethnicity
  • Getting someone to state their sexuality
  

For the client, the experience of being asked questions can be very unpleasant if they find themselves being asked a vast number of them that do not appear to be consistent or related to their understanding of their problem. The assessor, by asking the questions, can seem judgmental, demanding, intrusive and rude. These difficulties are compounded by insecurity about what happens to information and the implications of giving the ‘wrong’ answer.

Objectives

By the end of the course participants will be able to:
• Identify how they feel about some of the types of questions they are expected to ask
• List the kinds of barriers a client may have to answering questions
• Describe to a client the reasons for asking so many questions
• Provide a client with the necessary information for them to decide how to answer a question
• Structure a question in a way that obtains the right kind of response
• Enable a client to provide additional information
• Record the responses to questions accurately

Who will benefit from attending?

The learning on this course is essential for all front line workers especially those who may be alone with clients.

Length 1 day – 9:30 – 4:30 (or equivalent)

This course is designed and delivered in association with DrugScope - the UK centre for drugs information.

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Please note
All our courses are commissioned for groups and organisations. If you have more than three people who would benefit from working together on this topic, use the link at the the bottom of the page to contact me, or click here to find out more about getting us to deliver a programme.

We regret that we do not have an open access programme