Teaching Moment | Occasion d’enseignement Teaching communication skills

Communication is the act of conveying a message to another person, and it is an essential skill for establishing physician-patient relationships and effective functioning among health care professionals. Participants in the Toronto Consensus meeting in the early 1990s concluded there was enough evidence to prove that doctor-patient communication problems are common and that they adversely affect patient care.1 Traditionally, most medical trainees learn verbal and nonverbal communication skills by watching their teachers and preceptors. In family medicine settings, learners are expected to be actively coached in com-munication by their supervising teachers—family phys-icians and other members of the health care team. More recently, skills workshops and simulated practice ses-sions have been used to teach communication skills. In the United States, a cross-sectional survey of famil