Developing essential professional skills: a framework for teaching and learning about feedback.

BACKGROUND: The ability to give and receive feedback effectively is a key skill for doctors, aids learning between all levels of the medical hierarchy, and provides a basis for reflective practice and life-long learning. How best to teach this skill? DISCUSSION: We suggest that a single "teaching the skill of feedback" session provides superficial and ineffective learning in a medical culture that often uses feedback skills poorly or discourages feedback. Our experience suggests that both the skill and the underlying attitude informing its application must be addressed, and is best done so longitudinally and reiteratively using different forms of feedback delivery. These feedback learning opportunities include written and oral, peer to peer and cross-hierarchy, public and private, thereby addressing different cognitive processes and attitudinal difficulties. SUMMARY: We conclude by asking whether it is possible to build a consensus approach to a framework for teaching and learning feedback skills?RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are