BACKGROUND Experts suggest observation and feedback is a useful tool for teaching and evaluating medical student communication skills during the clinical years. Failing to do this effectively risks contributing to deterioration of students' communication skills during the very educational period in which they are most important. While educators have been queried about their thoughts on this iss...

OBJECTIVES To discuss the problems encountered teaching interviewing skills to first year medical students and describe their responses to a structured workshop in interviewing skills. METHODS Focus groups and a short evaluation questionnaire filled in by 56 first year medical students before and after a workshop in interviewing skills were used. RESULTS All students evaluated their skills ...

INTRODUCTION Communication skills training has been progressively integrated into the Bachelor of Radiation Therapy programme in New Zealand throughout the last 3 years. This innovative study aimed to explore students' perceptions of their learning from participation in communication skills workshops. The purpose was to expose students to a variety of common clinical situations that they could ...

The importance of communication skills training in undergraduate medical education is now widely accepted. However little is known about student attitudes towards their own communication skills and whether their attitudes changes as a result of participating in communication skills courses. The aim of the present study was to identify these attitudes prior to commencing such a course and to fur...

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of two psychological interventions designed to reduce injury among dancers by enhancing coping skills. Participants were 35 ballet dancers. They were assigned to three conditions: control (n = 12), autogenic training (n = 12), and a broad-based coping skills condition, including autogenic training, imagery, and self-talk (n = 11). The 12-week...

INTRODUCTION Primary care residencies are expected to provide training in cultural competence. However, we have insufficient information about the perceptions of stakeholders actually involved in healthcare (i.e. residents, faculty and patients) regarding commonly encountered cross-cultural barriers and the skills required to overcome them. METHOD This study used a total of 10 focus groups to...

OBJECTIVE Group training in communication skills [communication skills training (CST)] has become partly mandatory for oncology staff. However, so far, a comprehensive meta-analysis on the efficacy is lacking. DESIGN Included studies either compare the efficacy of a specific training with a control group or look at the additional effect of booster sessions on communication behaviour, attitude...

BACKGROUND In the interests of patient health outcomes, it is important for medical students to develop clinical communication skills. We previously proposed a telehealth communication skills training platform (EQClinic) with automated nonverbal behavior feedback for medical students, and it was able to improve medical students' awareness of their nonverbal communication. OBJECTIVE This study...

PURPOSE OF REVIEW This review gives an overview of recent developments in the field of communication skills training programs designed for cancer health care professionals. RECENT FINDINGS The Web of Knowledge was searched for empirical papers published between January 2002 and February 2005. Twenty-two papers were included in the review describing 13 different studies. Four studies were rand...

Physicians' interpersonal and communication skills have a significant impact on patient care and correlate with improved healthcare outcomes. Some studies suggest, however, that communication skills decline during the four years of medical school. Regulatory and other medical organizations, recognizing the importance of interpersonal and communication skills in the practice of medicine, now req...