Communication skills training for health care professionals. What is it all about?

摘要

Dear Sir Very few articles clearly report the basic strategies for empathic communication and Communication Skills Training (CST) in medical education. A successful communication is mainly the use of verbal and non-verbal skills to improve the patient well-being through an empathic approach. Although CST does not automatically generate the anticipated outcomes (van den Eertwegh et al., 2013), it remains the pivotal factor for the excellence in health care professions (Rotthoff et al., 2011). In this study, a grounded theory approach examined the transcripts of experts in communication interacting with real patients. This generated the codes and categories of empathic communication: Listening: understanding and active attention to patients' emotions and concerns; Learning: unveiling patients' feelings by using open questions ("What you are feeling is..."); Predicting: making a mental map of forthcoming interpersonal scenarios ("If I say this, then what happens to this patient?"); Checking: clarifying with patients if the practitioner's hypotheses on what they are feeling are correct ("If I understood, what you're saying is..."); Refraining: verifying the patient's understanding and modifying the own communication accordingly; Metaphorising: using simple metaphors to explain complex medical information (e.g., "Your heart is like a pump"); Counselling: moving patients to a desired course of actions ("About some exercise?"); Recapping: summarising what was told and understood ("Let's do a recap!").