The General Medical Council stresses the importance of ensuring that doctors have teaching skills. These relate not only to teaching students and other health professionals, but also, as reflected in the Generic Curriculum for the Medical Specialties, to the vital task of teaching patients. Various educa-tionaL theories have been found to be useful in helping doctors and students to understand the teaching and learning process. Other work has focused on communication skills: well-known consultation frameworks highlight the importance of a collaborative approach, and a recognition of the patient's perspective.However, theories of 'health education' andthose of communication skills do not necessarily map onto conventional educational theory. This paper considers the patient as learner and the health professional as teacher. We seek to illustrate how educational theory may be used in the consultation to facilitate learning, and to influence behaviour. Our examples derive from personal clinical experience: as SC is a dermatologist, they relate to skin complaints, but we expect that clinicians in any field will be able to identify similar scenarios.
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