Patient-centredness from education to practice: The ‘lived’ impact of communication skills training

Figures & data

Table

Practice points

CST could raise its impact by: leaving students more room to creatively develop their own communication style, within the framework of existing guidelines; making patient-centred communication more relevant to students through integration of skills training with real practice; offering a realistic training ground to train ‘ideal’ skills in the light of a ‘context-sensitive’ target; helping students to translate the primary-care-rooted model of patient-centredness into various specialization contexts.

Table 1  Participant demographics and origin of quotes (Q)

	FG 1–2	FG 3–4	FG 5–6	FG 7	FG 8	FG 9–11	Interviews
Study stage	Undergraduate year 4	Undergraduate year 7	Undergraduate years 6–7	Graduate years 1–2	Postgraduate	Postgraduate	Graduate year 2
Discipline	–	–	–	GP	Specialists	GP	Mixed
Before/after clerkships	Before	After	During	–	–	–	–
University	Antwerp	Antwerp	Ghent	Mixed	Antwerp	Mixed	Antwerp
n (range)	15 (6–9)	11 (4–7)	13 (6–7)	5	6	17 (5–7)	15
m/f	2/15	2/9	4/10	2/3	3/3	10/7	8/7
CST	+	–	+	Mixed	–	–	+
Q	6,8	4	3,9,14,24	1		27	2,5,7,10–13,15–23, 25,26,28,29

Notes: CST, communication skills training; FG, focus group; GP, general practice; and Q, quotation number.

Figure 1. The recycling process of patient-centred communication in the transition from education to practice.