Doctor-Patient Communication In Medical Education: Status And Implementation

Patient-centered communication is one of the core clinical skills. Skill-based, structured communication teaching and assessing should play a foundational role in modern medical education. American methods could provide us some new perspectives and useful experiences to promote medical communication education in China.With current doctor-patient relationships in tension, communication is becoming one of the social consensuses inside and outside of medical professional community. Medicine not only as a science but also an art, effective and efficient communication is an element of modern medical professionalism. Within traditional biomedical model, doctors always focus on taking biomedical history from patients by interview skills; in biopsychosocial model, providing care should be the main goal of communication.Doctor-patient communication as an information exchanging process in patient care should be skill-based. Medical communication as an academic medical field could be divided into clinical practice, education and research three sections. This research mainly pays attention to communication education.In the first chapter, we define the core research objective and discus the perspectives, methods and academic resources. In Chapter 2, based on the "L.L.Y case" , we clarify the importance of clinical communication competence training to medical professionals. By describing a case-based ethics teaching, we get a conclusion that traditional teaching and assessing methods are insufficient to communication training. At this point, international especially American educational progress is a good model to develop Chinese communication education. In Chapter 3, we explore the rational ways to implement communication in medical education. After observing the POM model at George Washington University Medical Center (GWUMC), and describing the design and implementing of a workshop concerning about how to teach residents clinical ethics and communication skills using standardized patients by American medical educators, we summarize some highlights about the American learner-centered experiential communication learning methods, and rethink how to improve our working in Chinese context. As a primary conclusion in Chapter 4, we explore the philosophy of doctor-patient communication that is understanding, trust and healing.In the appendix, we submit a communication teaching module design as the primary outcome of this research.