Objective To study the current situation of doctor-patient communication education for medical undergraduates, and meanwhile to analyze the students’ satisfactory degree to communication education and its influencing factors, so as to provide sound suggestions to promote the students’ clinical communication abilities.
Methods Using simple sampling, 50% of the students who majored in clinical medicine in grade 2006-2009 in West China Medical School of Sichuan University were selected as respondents. The investigation was conducted by face to face talk with a self-designed questionnaire. The data were input using EpiData 3.0 software and the results were analyzed by SPSS 13.0 software.
Results A total of 450 questionnaires were distributed, and 404 were validly retrieved (89.78%). Among the respondents, 74.3% of them were satisfied with the current situation of doctor-patient communication education; 75.7% of them begun to know doctor-patient communication education since the stage of learning basic knowledge; 49.8% of them were trained by means of problem-based-learning (PBL); and 65.5% of them were trained with auxiliary standardized patient (SP). “Grade”, “Gender”, “SP used” and “PBL used” were the main factors affecting the satisfactory degree to current doctor-patient communication education (P=0.029, 0.023, 0.012, and 0.029, respectively).
Conclusion The medical undergraduates’ satisfactory degree to current doctor-patient communication education is generally high, but it is also affected by various factors. Although doctor-patient communication education has started early, the training system is still problematic and the teaching resources coverage is limited. So in order to make a further systematic, standardized, overall designed education for students’ cognition and communication skills, the medical colleges should open integrated doctor-patient communication curriculum that combines with both PBL and SP auxiliary teaching methods, and covers all the undergraduate learning stage.
Citation： LI Ling,SONG Jiulin,YANG Shiyuan,LIAO Banghua,HUANG Jin. Survey of Medical Undergraduates’ Satisfactory Degree to Doctor-Patient Communication Education. Chinese Journal of Evidence-Based Medicine, 2013, 13(4): 421-424. doi: 10.7507/1672-2531.20130072 Copy