Brush up your communication skills
How important are communication skills? Putting the evidence together
 |
You can probably think of plenty of examples from your own experience of where good consultation skills have helped - or bad consultation skills hindered - patient care.
There's plenty of published evidence that good communication skills are important in out consultations. Cooper and Hassell (2002) have listed the following examples:
Patients rightly expect their doctors to be effective communicators, and communication failure has been cited as the commonest cause of complaint by patients (Simpson, Buckman 1991; HMSO 1993).
Specific areas of complaint centre on:
- failure to gather adequate and accurate information;
- failure to provide sufficient, comprehensible information;
- failure to listen to patients' concerns;
- neglect of patients' psychosocial needs;
- and failure to develop a mutually acceptable relationship with patients (Hargie, Dickson et al 1998).
There is evidence that patients benefit from consultations with doctors possessing good interpersonal skills, not only in terms of satisfaction but also through improved compliance with treatment and better health outcomes (Hargie, Dickson et al 1998).
Even when the physician has no effective therapy to offer, demonstrating understanding and empathy and providing adequate information reduces patient anxiety and distress (Simpson, Buckman 1991).
Think
Is being a good communicator is something you either have or don't have? Can we really learn it?
Well, consultation skills can be taught and assessed [5], and there is a significant evidence base to inform the context, content and methods of such teaching (Simpson, Buckman 1991; Kurtz, Silverman 1996; Aspegren 1999).
Even taking a biomedical view of the consultation, in which eliciting all relevant information and reaching a clear diagnosis is the paramount goal, there is evidence that specific teaching of communication skills improves performance and that this improvement is sustained (Evans, Coman 1996).
Think
As a doctor, what do you want to get out of a consultation? Write down at least eight things - it should be pretty easy! Then move on to the next page.
Next page: What doctors want to get out of their consultations
Study guide by: Michael Harris (Department of General Practice, Bath).
Last updated: 31 October 2005