[MUSIC PLAYING] EMILY GURLEY: Hi. My name is Emily Gurley. And I'm an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Now, that you know about contact tracing, what it is, all the steps, and all the basic principles. Now, it's time to talk about the how. How can you be most effective in your communication with cases and contacts to get your job done? We're going to offer you some skills in this module. By the end of this lecture, you should be able to describe the meaning and the importance of building rapport. You should be able to explain some ways that you can have more effective communication with cases and contacts. You should understand the difference between different question types, such as open questions versus closed questions. You should be able to describe what it means to be an active listener. You should be able to explain the four basic types of human communication, and how they apply to contact tracing. And, finally, you should be able to describe and troubleshoot some common difficulties with case investigation and contact tracing. Let's start at the beginning with the importance of rapport. What does rapport mean? Rapport is a feeling of mutual understanding, trust, and agreeableness between people. At the end of the day, to be effective as a contact tracer, you will have to have a good rapport with the cases and the contacts that you speak with. If you are able to successfully build rapport with cases and contacts, then you'll be able to ask for and get accurate information. You'll be able to provide them with education about SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19, important information that they're going to need to know. It's important for their health and for the health of others. If you build effective rapport, you should be able to persuasively ask for them to follow isolation and quarantine instructions. Isolation and quarantine are difficult to do well. And if you have a good rapport with them, you're going to improve the chances dramatically that they feel like they can effectively isolate and quarantine themselves. So rapport is central to everything that contact tracers do. Building rapport is very important. And so, you want to know how to have an effective call, how to have effective communication with a case or a contact. In the rest of this presentation, we're going to talk to you about tips for effective communication, types of questions that you'll need to know. We'll talk to you about what active listening means, and provide you with an overall communication framework so you can understand the type of communication that you're having with the case or the contact. At the end of the day, this is all about connecting with people. You should be empathetic. You should always use a compassionate tone. A good attitude will always improve the quality of a call. [MUSIC PLAYING]