Pharmacy Students’ Attitudes Towards Learning Communication Skills: The Case Of The United Arab Emirates

Abstract

Effective communication amongst pharmacists, especially clinical pharmacists, physicians, nurses, patients, patients’ families and relatives and health care personnel is essential. Poor communication does not only lead to frustration and lack of respect among professions but also may compromise patient care if important information is misunderstood, ineffectively conveyed, or left out. This research explores clinical pharmacy students’ and clinical pharmacy graduates’ attitudes towards the relevance and importance of learning communication skills in their pharmacy careers in the United Arab Emirates. For the purposes of this study, Rees, Sheard, and Davies’ (2002) Communication Skills Attitudes Scale (CSAS) is used to measure pharmacy students’ and pharmacy graduates’ attitudes towards communication skills learning. Although this measure was originally designed to measure medical students’ attitudes towards communication skills learning in a European country, the results obtained from our study are not dissimilar to those reported by Rees et al. (2002) in their study. The paper concludes with some practical suggestions for pharmacy experts in charge of pharmacy communication courses.

Japanese Anime Fandoms in the UAE: An Exploratory Study on Media Accessibility, Habits and Cultural Perceptions

“…Often Japanese manga and anime encompass narratives that discuss issues such as relationships, sexuality, transgender relations, abuse, alcohol, violence, and drug consumption that exist in Japanese and other cultures but are not easily debated in the Arab world 74 . Thus, Arab fans immediately notice divergences between their traditions and Japanese culture, especially when they are confronted with uncensored scenes or dialogues that embarrass some and desensitize others because they cannot, and perhaps will not entirely relate to such issues.…”

Factors associated with pharmacy students' attitudes towards learning communication skills – A study among Nordic pharmacy students

“…15,[17][18][19][20][22][23][24][25]27,[30][31][32][33] The literature on pharmacy students' attitudes towards communication skills learning, based on the CSAS, is scarce and not very detailed. 34,35 An Australian study used some items from the CSAS in connection with patient communication skills training and found that the training improved students' attitudes for several of the items, including how important the students thought the topic was. 35 This study is the first study to explore Nordic pharmacy students' attitudes to communication skills learning, and also the associations between these attitudes and various student characteristics.…”

A Qualitative Study on Danish Student Pharmacists’ Attitudes Towards and Experience of Communication Skills Training

“…Factors associated with positive attitudes towards learning communication skills were a newer pharmacy program, being female, acknowledging a need for improving one’s communication skills and believing one’s communication skills are not the result of personality [24]. Currently the vast majority of research on communication skills and student pharmacists explores their attitudes by applying quantitative research methods [22,24,25,26]. Other studies have focused on the specific teaching methods that can be used to structure CST in pharmacy education; such as blended learning, simulated patients and scaffolding [27,28,29].…”