Good communication between a doctor and his or her patient serves two essential functions: to share clinical information and to establish a good doctor-patient relationship.1 Effective doctor-patient communication is associated with many benefits, which include patient satisfaction, adherence to treatment, symptom improvement, reduction in psychological distress, and patient's perception of physician competence.2 Moreover, the majority of complaints and lawsuits against doctors cite poor communication as the main cause of the patient's grievance.3 These findings have led to the prioritisation of teaching communication skills in medical school curricula in recent years, yet a number of issues still need to be considered. There is disagreement about what the most effective way of teaching communication skills is, but there is evidence that more experiential methods of learning are preferred by students and are more effective than didactic demonstrating or lecturing. 4 It is also not clear at what stage in their training and for what duration students should be taught communication skills, and whether different students are suited to different teaching methods. 5,6 Many programmes now use actors in simulated doctor-patient consultation scenarios and provide video feedback of the student's interviewing skills, but it is not clear how well these acquired skills translate to real encounters with patients. Many of the studies attempting to evaluate different methods for teaching communication skills lack a control group, 7 and often the main measurement is based on the student's own self-evaluation, which does not correlate with other measures, such as evaluation by their teachers, and may not be indicative of actual improvement as poorly performing students tend to overrate their ability.
8,9Psychodynamic teaching at University College London School of MedicineWe were interested in evaluating the effectiveness of two methods of teaching medical students about communication between doctor and patient and about the doctorpatient relationship: the University College London (UCL) student psychotherapy scheme (SPS) and Balint groups, both of which are based on a psychodynamic paradigm and are focused on increasing students' awareness and understanding of the emotional aspects of the doctor-patient relationship.At the beginning of each academic year all of the firstyear clinical medical students on the introductory course are invited to an introductory lecture about the SPS and Balint groups: interested students then volunteer to join. Each year, about 30-40% of the annual student intake Aims and method To evaluate the effectiveness of two psychodynamic psychotherapy teaching methods, a student psychotherapy scheme (SPS) and participation in a Balint group, in teaching first-year clinical medical students about doctor-patient communication and the doctor-patient relationship. The 28 students, who were randomly allocated to three groups (SPS group, Balint group starting at baseline and Balint group starting at 3 months and a...