About

Hello and Welcome,

My name is Greg Mercer.

I am an experienced Psychiatric Nurse and Educator – I am an Adjunct Profesor at Regis University, a Clinical Instructor at Northeastern University, and a NCLEX Instructor with Kaplan.

I also orient and train Nurses and others in MALS, CPR, and GRC.

GRC? You way wonder what that is – not surprising, as I have only begun publicizing it as of January 2012.

As GRC’s Creator , Editor in Chief, President, and alas, unpaid sole employee for now, I have developed GRC off and on for the last ten years.  GRC is my dream project.  It involves a still-evolving set of lectures: training material for Nurses and other care givers interested in learning better human relations skills.  I have gathered much research and expert practical knowledge and experience from a wide variety of sources.

These data consistently support five crucial points:

1) Effective human relations involve learned skills that most people have only partially mastered from instinct and upraising,

2) These skills are quite trainable, with a little education and ongoing practice,

3) The benefits of such training accrue from the very beginning of the process, and grow over time,

4) Much has been researched, refined, and proven in practice for many years: material more familiar within some professional circles than others, and

5) As it turns out, healthcare providers remain quite poorly trained in this area.  I see two main reasons.

First, in this age of massive and specialized knowledge, it is common to see knowledge obvious to one group completely unknown to another.  There is tremendous potential in gathering knowledge outside of your group’s ‘box’ (“as in  outside the box”), directly from another groups ‘box.’  You gain fresh, novel (to you) knowledge in this fashion, yet already refined and proven elsewhere, instead of reinventing the wheel, so to speak.

Second, because it has been so useful in many ways, the ubiquitous medical model tends to drive our health care education, research, and practice.  It inherently focuses attention on disease and dysfunction, and on parts over the whole.  Even in psychiatric work, disease, diagnoses, and symptoms play  starring roles, whereas human motivation is largely driven by normal aspects of human nature, as reflected in social psychology, cognitive science, etc.  As I often say:

Diseases don’t make decisions: people do.  

Diseases may distort decision-making or offer people bad information, but even most impaired people still make decisions, and are open to the same social influences as anyone else.

Care givers, who so desperately require the best people skills, receive little if any formal training in human relations.  What training they get is incomplete and limited, so they must rely on unrefined instincts and clumsy and ineffective teaching and motivational skills, greatly impairing their efficacy.  As a result, relationships with clients suffer, contributing to care giver stress, frustration, and legal liability: did you know that whether a patient likes and trusts a provider may well do more to shape their legal liability than does their actual  care or competence?  Sub-optimal people skills also contribute to treatment non-adherence: an ongoing, extremely costly national public health crisis.

Like playing chess, the rules of human relations are fairly simple and often familiar, yet one can build mastery throughout life and never fully exhaust their full potential.  Practice often involves learning to master dysfunctional instincts: to assess and act thoughtfully, instead of merely reacting automatically.  Human relations are endlessly fascinating.   This practice is gratifying, refreshing, and often rather pleasant.

Students learn how to more easily and efficiently build client rapport and cooperation, improve treatment adherence and outcomes, to have more fun and get more done, with less wasted time, less frustration, less stress, more confidence.  I make these promises confidently, based on my own clinical experience, that of students, and the results of many impressive figures in the past and present.  But it depends on your participation, your practice, to work.

Having mostly promoted this program informally to date, my goal is to provide more formal lectures and training sessions, and to eventually integrate GRC ideas into Academic curricula and an independent Institute, analogous to that of CPI or AHA training programs.

Thanks so much for your attention to this important and exciting work:

Have no doubt: with the right tools, we can begin to make the world a better place, every day.