Enhancing medical students' communication skills: development and evaluation of an undergraduate training program

The students participating in the project and a comparison group of students from the standard degree program were surveyed at the beginning and end of the courses. The survey consisted of a self-assessment of their skills as well as a standardised expert rating and an evaluation of the modules by means of a questionnaire.Students who attended the communication skills course exhibited a considerable increase of communication skills in this newly developed training. It was also observed that students in the intervention group had a greater degree of self-assessed competence following training than the medical students in the comparison group. This finding is also reflected in the results from a standardised objective measure.The empirical results of the study showed that the training enabled students to acquire specialised competence in communication through the course of a newly developed training program. These findings will be used to establish new communication training at the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf.Empirical findings show that both physicians and patients benefit from the effective use of communication skills. Studies have demonstrated that physicians' communication skills lead to greater therapy adherence [1] and overall satisfaction with care [2] among patients. Another effect frequently described in the literature is a decrease in patients' distress and susceptibility to symptoms of depression or anxiety [3-5]. Moreover, a decrease in health care utilisation related to physicians' good communication practises has recently been demonstrated [6].These findings underline the importance of good communication techniques in medical consultations and indicate the need to provide future medical doctors with training in these skills. The first descriptions of communication training emerged in the early 1970s [7], and the subject is now well established in most medical schools across the US [8,9] and the UK [10,11], as well as some other European c