Recently, we published a paper in Patient Education and Counseling, where we document that hospital physicians’ insight in own performance improved after a 20 hour communication skills course. Moreover, we also found that 3 1/2 years after the course, 59% of the physicians said this course changed their practice with lasting effect. This is the first paper evaluating communication skills training several years after. Again the power of the FOUR HABITS approach to effective clinical communication has been demonstrated.
Calendar and course updates with all planned communication skills training this year
We have now updated the calendar and courses with all planned communication skills training this year. We recently had a tremendous experience in Uppsala with very positive feedback from the participants. Nevertheless, we are continuously working on improvement of the concept, which has been demonstrated effective in a randomised controlled trial.
Criticism aimed at Fossli Jensen et al in Patient Education & Counseling
In the February issue of Patient Education & Counseling professor Anders Bærheim at the University of Bergen criticizes a previous work by Fossli Jensen et al in which a crossover randomized controlled trial was used to demonstrate the effect of a course in clinical communication. His point is that a crossover study is inadequate as this type of study requires that the situation at the start of the second intervention should be equal to the situation at the start of the first intervention. Read our response here.
Updated resources
We have now updated the resources on this website with several new links. There is a link for French speaking doctors, as well as English language links to websites in Australia and the USA that have excellent teaching material about communication in the emergency department, with cancer patients, and for doctors that do not have English as first language.