gms | German Medical Science

Communication skills training in challenging situations:

• A patient consults a physician and demands an alternative medical treatment;
• A man has died of acute heart failure – now the relatives need to be informed;
• A patient repeatedly comes to consultation hours because of hypertension, but the intake of recommended medication remains inconsistent.
• A routine examination with the unexpected incidence of malignancy – the diagnosis has to be disclosed to the patient.

These situations and similar ones are part of every physician’s clinical routine and often pose a real challenge. About half of a patient’s health problems are not mentioned in a common doctor-patient-conversation. In more than half of the consultations, physician and patient disagree on where the main medical problem of the patient really lies. Psychosocial problems and mental illnesses are often not identified.

After having consulted a physician, patients frequently do not remember everything they were told about their illness or recommended therapy. Public criticism regarding physicians is not directed towards their clinical abilities, but their insufficient communicative competence.

In this workshop we will practice communicative skills with a simulated patient and work on constructive feedback.

take-home messages:

• communicative skills are learnable [1]
• physicians’ communicative competences can be best improved by video recording and feedback [2]
• “learning by doing” combined with feedback is most effective [3]