2 September 2014 – 40 participants attended a talk entitled ‘Promoting Treatment Adherence with Motivational Interviewing’ at the Senate Room in International Medical University (IMU)’s Bukit Jalil Campus. The talk is a joint effort of the Malaysian Pharmaceutical Society – Young Pharmacist Chapter (MPS-YPC) and IMU Alumni. The speaker for this talk is Ms Lee Ching Li, who is a lecturer of the University in the Department of Nutrition and Dietetics. She is experienced in counselling on weight loss and maintenance using Motivational Interviewing techniques. In this talk, Ms Lee provided the participants with the opportunity to learn and appreciate effective communication skills to empower patients in making their lifestyle changes. Motivational Interviewing (MI) was introduced to engage patient behavior change within various healthcare settings. Hands-on-activity in identifying how MI fits within the patient-pharmacist dialogue was also carried out at the talk. This provided a better understanding on the application of MI. Before the talk ended, there was a Questions and Answers session. During this session, a few participants took the opportunity to clear their doubts. One of the IMU Year 4 Pharmacy student said that she found this talk to be very informative. Previously, she has learnt about MI briefly in class but this talk has helped her to understand better on how to apply it on clinical practice. She was enlightened by the knowledge that was delivered during the talk and she was excited to join such a talk again.
