Verbal and non-verbal communication skills including empathy during history taking of undergraduate medical students

Abstract

BackgroundVerbal and non-verbal aspects of communication as well as empathy are known to have an important impact on the medical encounter. The aim of the study was to analyze how well final year undergraduate medical students use skills of verbal and non-verbal communication during history-taking and whether these aspects of communication correlate with empathy and gender.MethodsDuring a three steps performance assessment simulating the first day of a resident 30 medical final year students took histories of five simulated patients resulting in 150 videos of physician-patient encounters. These videos were analyzed by external rating with a newly developed observation scale for the verbal and non-verbal communication and with the validated CARE-questionnaire for empathy. One-way ANOVA, t-tests and bivariate correlations were used for statistical analyses.ResultsFemale students showed signicantly higher scores for verbal communication in the case of a female patient with abdominal pain (p < 0.05), while male students started the conversations significantly more often with an open question (p < 0.05) and interrupted the patients significantly later in two cases than female students (p < 0.05). The number of W-questions asked by all students was significantly higher in the case of the female patient with abdominal pain (p < 0.05) and this patient was interrupted after the beginning of the interview significantly earlier than the patients in the other four cases (p < 0.001). Female students reached significantly higher scores for non-verbal communication in two cases (p < 0.05) and showed significantly more empathy than male students in the case of the female patient with abdominal pain (p < 0.05). In general, non-verbal communication correlated significantly with verbal communication and with empathy while verbal communication showed no significant correlation with empathy.ConclusionsUndergraduate medical students display differentiated communication behaviour with respect to verbal and non-verbal aspects of communication and empathy in a performance assessment and special differences could be detected between male and female students. These results suggest that explicit communication training and feedback might be necessary to raise students’ awareness for the different aspects of communication and their interaction.

Study on non-verbal communication knowledge among doctors of non-clinical and para clinical departments of Government Vellore medical college hospital, Vellore, Tamil Nadu, India

“…On Running the Multi Variate Analysis for study variables with Statistical significance on logistic regression was seen for three variables-Exposure to External resources, Under graduation persued at same state and Age More than 35 Years.In this study Males out number females by Participation, Males contributed 55% and females were 45% only, But the Intelligence quotient or any other Unique technique among the gender perspective has not been applied in this study. But similar study by Vogel D, Meyer M et al, shows that female students showed Higher Scores for verbal communication compared to Male students while communicating with patients 3. Even the Empathy component in Nonverbal communication was also taken into study and Female students scored well than male students in the study by Vogel D, Meyer M et al…”

Simulated patient and role play methodologies for communication skills and empathy training of undergraduate medical students

“…Communication in medical encounters comprises verbal and non-verbal aspects. Non-verbal messages tend to override the verbal messages and as reported by Mehrabian and Ferris, the impact of the verbal communication represents only 7% from the total impact of communication [6,7]. On the other side, vocal communication has an impact of 38% and facial communication, 55% [6].…”

Simulated patient and role play methodologies for communication skills and empathy training of undergraduate medical students

“…Communication in medical encounters comprises verbal and non-verbal aspects. Non-verbal messages tend to override the verbal messages and as reported by Mehrabian and Ferris, the impact of the verbal communication represents only 7% from the total impact of communication [5,6]. On the other side, vocal communication has an impact of 38% and facial communication, 55% [5].…”

“…There are several studies demonstrating comparable performance levels between ASP and SRP, but there is a cost-effectiveness advantage for SRP [16,17]. However, there are few studies that evaluate the most impactful part of the communication process, the non-verbal communication [5]. In this context, the aim of our study was to analyze whether and how well medical students from the Faculty of Medicine of Brest use skills of verbal and non-verbal communication in the 2 different approaches, SRP and ASP.…”