Diagnostically Fit for the Future? The Students’ Perspective

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2016.07.083Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Abstract

Objectives

Medical students training incorporates learning how to take a medical history with an increasing focus on professional bedside manner and communication training. This study examined students’ evaluation of the communication training classes at the Medical University of Vienna.

Methods

A survey based on a self-administered questionnaire with 16 questions about five main categories: social skills and communication, demeanour, expertise, ability to combine communicative and expert skills/knowledge was sent to students in their third, fourth, fifth and sixth academic year.

Results

The majority of students rated the communication classes positively, especially, they felt their communicative and social skills improved much. However, large deficits were pointed out in the transfer of expertise and the lack of improvement in the ability to combine communicative and expert skills/knowledge.

Conclusions

This data indicates the need for re-evaluation of the training of social and communicative skills at medical universities, especially we propose the integration of field specific history taking and communication frameworks.

Keywords

Medical history taking
communicative training
medical students
physician-patient-communication
communicative skills
social skills

Cited by (0)

Peer-review under responsibility of the organizing committee of HEAd’16.