BACKGROUND Effective communication with health care providers has been found as relevant for physical and psychological health outcomes as well as the patients' adherence. However, the validity of the findings depends on the quality of the applied measures. This study aimed to provide an overview of measures of physician-patient communication and to evaluate the methodological quality of psycho...

AIM To explore physician-patient communication practices during the process of obtaining informed consent in a hospital setting in Croatia. METHODS Two hundred and fifty patients (response rate 78%) from five tertiary level hospitals in Zagreb, Croatia, anonymously filled in the questionnaire on informed consent and communication practices by Nemcekova et al in the period from April to Decemb...

OBJECTIVE Despite growing recognition of the importance of communication with children with life-limiting illnesses and their families, there has been limited research that includes the child's perspective. The purpose of the current study was to identify the aspects of physician communication that children with life-limiting illnesses and their parents perceived to be facilitative or obstructi...

OBJECTIVE To examine whether physician-patient communication in multi-bedded rooms differs from communication in single rooms during ward rounds. METHODS Ward rounds in single-bedded patient rooms and ward rounds in four-bedded rooms were audiotaped and analyzed with an adapted version of MIARS. The researcher completed an observational checklist of each encounter. We measured: the duration o...

CONTEXT Poor patient-physician communication increases the risk of patient complaints and malpractice claims. To address this problem, licensure assessment has been reformed in Canada and the United States, including a national standardized assessment of patient-physician communication and clinical history taking and examination skills. OBJECTIVE To assess whether patient-physician communicat...

BACKGROUND Patient-physician communication should be based on plain and simple language. Despite communication skill trainings in undergraduate medical curricula medical students and physicians are often still not aware of using medical jargon when communicating with patients. The aim of this study was to compare linguistic communication skills of undergraduate medical students who voluntarily ...

BACKGROUND The quality of physician communication skills influences health-related decisions, including use of cancer screening tests. We assessed whether patient-physician communication examination scores in a national, standardized clinical skills examination predicted future use of screening mammography (SM). METHODS Cohort study of 413 physicians taking the Medical Council of Canada clini...

Design: Cross-sectional study of pediatric encounters motivated by cold symptoms between October 1, 2000, and June 30, 2001. Each encounter was videotaped. Physicians completed a postvisit survey that measured whether they perceived the parent as expecting antibiotics. Coded communication variables were merged with survey variables. Multivariate analyses identified key predictors of parent-phys...

In this month’s issue of Pediatrics, Henrikson et al report a trial of the impact of communication training for physicians on the vaccine hesitancy of parents. The authors found that a physician-targeted communication intervention did not reduce vaccine hesitancy in mothers nor improve physician confidence compared with standard care. However, the study requires careful interpretation and shoul...

Design: Cross-sectional study of pediatric encounters motivated by cold symptoms between October 1, 2000, and June 30, 2001. Each encounter was videotaped. Physicians completed a postvisit survey that measured whether they perceived the parent as expecting antibiotics. Coded communication variables were merged with survey variables. Multivariate analyses identified key predictors of parent-phys...