Teaching Medical Students Interactional Skills

Abstract

To teach first-year medical students to communicate and interact with patients more effectively, we designed and evaluated a course that uses recent developments in communication technics. The students' goals included identification of selected doctor–patient interactions, recognition and description of their feelings and reactions to the interview, and learning new ways of responding in the interview setting. The student requires no prior knowledge of clinical medicine but gains actual interview experience. Instructors are trained to use uniform teaching strategies.