Despite the central role that communication skills play in contemporary accounts of effective health care delivery in general, and the communication of medical error specifically, there is no common or consensual core in the health professions regarding the nature of such skills. This lack of consensus reflects, in part, the tendency for disciplines to reinvent concepts and measures without fir...

BACKGROUND We sought to assess self-rated importance of the medical interview to clinical practice and competence in physician-patient communication among new internal medicine faculty at an academic medical center. METHODS Since 2001, new internal medicine faculty at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine (Rochester, Minnesota) have completed a survey on physician-patient communication. The sur...

The notion of communicative competence has been deemed fuzzy in communication studies. This fuzziness has led to tensions among engineers across tenures in interpreting what constitutes communicative competence. The study seeks to investigate novice and professional engineers’ understanding of the said notion in terms of two main elements of communicative competence: linguistic and rhetorical c...

Lifelong competence development is a fundamental premise for an information society, as well as major aim and challenge. Facing the variety of learning programs and qualification measures, problems emerge in supporting lifelong learning. Efficient competence development necessitates providing learners with learning opportunities which are appropriate for their current knowledge and for their in...