RESEARCH ARTICLE How do United Kingdom e

The imperative to effectively teach and assess clinical communication as part of undergraduate and postgradu-ate medical education is recognised both at national and international levels. In the UK this has been consistently advocated by the General Medical Council [1-3] and following the Bristol enquiry it was reported that “Improving responsiveness to patients has been a goal of health policy in the United Kingdom for several decades” [4]. In 2008, and building on earlier work, The UK Council for Clinical Communication in Undergraduate Medical Education (a grouping of clinical communication leads for all UK Medical Schools, hereafter referred to as UK Council) published a national consensus statement [5] which describes a core curriculum for inclusion in medical curricula. The literature on clinical communication is compre