By Hannah Cox In a follow up post relating to "Do Good Grades Predict a Strong Doctor," I thought it may be important to examine what medical schools are actually doing to help give their students a strong educational background on communication, not just health care practices. The article "How we train undergraduate medical school students in decoding patients' nonverbal communication clues," a study completed at the University of Barcelona, aims to implement a training program that teaches second year undergraduate medical school students about examining/analyzing patients' nonverbal communication cues. This particular university found it important for students to have these decoding and encoding skills before they enter the field, which we, as nonverbal communication students, can appreciate. Students are expected to complete the following objectives: "To distinguish different components of NVC [nonverbal communication] in patients’ behavior, to perceive patients’ emotions through patients’ facial expression, to recognize patients’ emotions through the interaction between the nonverbal components, to discriminate types of relations between VC [verbal communication] and NVC in doctor–patient interactions, and to identify the factors influencing an accurate interpretation of the meaning of specific nonverbal clues in a medical visit." The learning material is set up into four two-hour modules with small groups, and then two five-hour sessions with healthcare personnel as facilitators. At the end of the modules, students complete a multiple choice test and also create write-ups on the session with healthcare personnel, and examine the importance of how these skills are relevant to being a doctor. In comparison to "Do good grades create a strong doctor," I think it is very beneficial that universities are realizing the importance of including nonverbal communication training in the curriculum for medical school. If doctors are able to decode complicated patients' nonverbal behaviors, doctors may be able to pick up on things that they normally may not interpret as noteworthy. Not only that, but patient satisfaction may also increase if doctors can prove they recognize these patients are real people - not just another client in the office. In topic 9 in our course material, we learned about nonverbal behavior that may be associated with deception. If doctors can detect patients' deception, it can help them best work to help the overall health. Patients may lie to protect their own image - an older individual may not want to admit memory loss or physical disability because of their own self-esteem. They may not want others to see them as disabled, or needing extra assistance. If a victim of domestic violence enters the office for broken bone/bruising, they may deceive doctors to avoid negative repercussions of their significant other. If a doctor can pick up on "something fishy" in this situation though, it can save the patient from future harm and/or future toxic relationships. Overall, doctors just want to be able to help people to their fullest ability. If patients are deceiving, doctors will need to have had extra training in nonverbal development in order to help patients in every way possible. Source: Molinuevo, B., Escorihuela, R., Fernandez-Teruel, A., Tobena, A., & Torrubia, R. (2001). How we train undergraduate medical students in decoding patients’ nonverbal clues. Medical Teacher, 804-807. Retrieved April 24, 2017. Check out this article on patient deception for more info! www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2736034/
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Authors
Hannah Cox Archives
April 2017
Categories |