People Involved:

Jo Brown

Tags:

Jo Brown   health & medical learning   pedagogy   simulation   2007/8  

Project Outputs:

 Project Sheet 236.08 Kb

Summary

The importance of effective CCS was outlined by the General Medical Council in Tomorrow’s Doctors (GMC 1993) an important guide to curriculum content for all UK medical schools.CCS have therefore been a growing part of the medical curriculum for the past 14 years.

Clinical communication skills in medical education are in the main taught in a simulated setting where students try out communication situations in a safe environment using group work and roleplay in preparation for using skills with real patients, in a real clinical environment. Studies have confirmed the effectiveness of simulation as a learning method (Maguire 1976; Evans, Stanley et al. 1991; Kurtz, Silverman et al. 1998).Many studies have reported the importance of effective clinical communication skills to improve patient health outcomes (Stewart 1995) to foster patient compliance to treatment (Pendleton, House et al. 1987) and to improve patient satisfaction with the medical encounter.(Williams,Weinman et al. 1998; Brown, Boles et al. 1999)

As a teacher of CCS for the last nine years however, I suspect that these skills and attitudes may have difficulty transferring to the clinical environments of hospital and General Practice.