Communication skills training: Adapting to the trends and moving forward

Abstract

Communication ability is one of the core requirements of doctors' competency. Teaching communication to medical students and junior doctors has attracted much attention. With the challenge of escalating demands, the status of training communication skills has been promoted in the past several decades. The training content was integrated with other courses and various pedagogic approaches have been applied and proved to be effective. Practical strategies and mixed types were highly recommended. However, there are still many problems, including the fragmentation of the training, insufficient practice, inadequate qualified teachers, case adaptation, course localization and impediment from the environment. This paper proposes some suggestions to solve the problems.