Physician-Patient Relationships, Methods of Teaching a Clinical Skill

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Establishing a two-way communication between the doctor and the patient will lead to accurate data collection, proper diagnosis, treatment and adherence to treatment. Communication skills require training. Teaching this skill at the patient's bedside is confronted with challenges. Busy hospitals, inadequate time, patient conditions and lack of knowledge of clinical professors, take the golden opportunity of education from students. The purpose of this study is to review the methods of communication skills training in medicine. METHODS: In this review article, we searched the English database like as Pubmed, Proquest, Google Scholar, Web of Science and Ovid and Persian database like as Magiran, Iran medex and SID with keywords like as physician patient relation, communication skills and medical education and all research related to the subject was included in the study. FINDINGS: In the preliminary review, 103 studies were found that after the removal of repetitive articles, reviewing the abstract of these articles and determining the degree of coordination with the aim of the present study, 38 remaining articles were studied carefully. Techniques such as the use of trained patients, video recording and replay, role play, checklist, and computer based training were introduced to train this skill in a variety of clinical settings. CONCLUSION: There are many new and effective ways to train patient communication skills in medicine, some of which do not require a real patient. The professors' awareness of the strength, weakness and application of any method can play an important role in improving the educational process