Communicating with Patients about Harmful Behaviors (Case Study Sample)

Case Study 1
Name
Institution
Introduction
The case ‘Communicating with Patients about Harmful Behaviors’ provides a prospect for a brief intervention about the alcoholic patients. Dr. Kennedy seems concerned about Travis’ tendency of drunkenness that landed him into injury. Efficient intervention trials are ideally based on motivational interviewing. The mode of intervention should seek to enhance individual’s intrinsic motivation to changing undesired behavior (Miller and Rollnick, 2012). However, Dr. Kennedy begins by asking many questions one after the other most of which are presuming of the patient’s situation. The case study brings out a number of ethical issues as discussed herein. Besides the brief intervention as used in the case, a four step broader intervention design could be used to improve the behavior of the patients. The brief intervention has a number of limitations and requires modification that could as well be useful to other patients away from a one-on-one discussion that annoys Travis. In essence, Dr. Kennedy lacks solid evidence for instance, with regard to how Travis endangers himself and people around him and so has no duty in revealing his verdict to Travis’ employer.