Learning Communication Skills for Dealing with Different Perspectives: Technologies for Health Sciences Education

Abstract

When health care professionals communicate with colleagues or patients, they have to deal with different perspectives, such as differing cultural expectations, linguistic differences, or conflicting therapeutic health concepts. The particular focus of this chapter is on the difference between two major therapeutic health concepts, that is, the biomedical and the biopsychosocial health concepts. Interactive technology can be used to support various communication strategies for health care students who have to handle different perspectives. In two separate studies we analyzed how wikis and online forums may be applied in order to give students the opportunity to develop skills for communicating adequately with colleagues (Study 1) and patients (Study 2) who have differing therapeutic health concepts. The findings show that wikis and online forums supported strategies for handling differing perspectives in their own particular ways, but there were also some similarities. In both studies approximately half of the differing perspectives expressed by others were simply ignored. However, the online forum setting seemed to support acceptance of a differing perspective in a higher degree than the wiki tool. In addition, the strategy of reconciling differing perspectives was used more frequently in the online forum than in the wiki setting. Finally, the strategy of rejecting differing perspectives did not occur in the online forum, but did occur frequently in the wiki. Our analysis demonstrates that, for the practical application of interactive technologies in health sciences education, careful selection and strategic implementation of e-learning tools seem to be important to achieve particular curriculum goals.