Training patients to reach their communication goals: a concordance perspective
Training patients to reach their communication goals: a concordance perspective
Improving clinicians' communication is necessary, but not sufficient to achieve the best possible communication in a clinical encounter. This chapter focuses on an area that has received much less emphasis — training patients to be good communicators. The physician–patient interaction is a dynamic, socially-constructed, and reciprocal process that relies on at least two participants. Effective communication in a physician-patient relationship, therefore, requires both parties to be actively involved and competent communicators. Moreover, patients' communication may influence physicians' responses. Thus, to understand fully and improve physician–patient communication requires a focus on both sides of the interaction. Considerable research has indicated that there is room for improvement in patients' communication skills, including asking questions, explicitly stating concerns, and verifying information. This chapter begins with a review of studies of patient communication training, both in and out of the oncology setting. It then explains the concept of concordance in the physician–patient relationship and how concordance provides a fruitful conceptual grounding for patient communication training.
Keywords: training, physicians, patients, communication skills, oncology, concordance, physician–patient relationship
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .