Teaching Communication Skills in Medical Language Courses: An Exploration of Its Efficiency in Teaching the Use of 'Perspective Checking Questions' in Health Education Talk

Mei-Hui Tsai

《Journal of Medical Education》 19卷3期 (2015/09) Pp. 120-131

https://doi.org/10.6145/jme201511

並列摘要

Background: Physicians received little training in transferring medical information to patients. One highly recommended skill is checking patients' perspectives' regarding the target information. This study proposes a pedagogy integrating communication training into medical language courses. Starting 2011, the course 'Medical Taiwanese' was offered to students in Southern Taiwan, with the dual goals of advancing students' limited Taiwanese proficiency and enhancing their skills in transferring medical knowledge to Taiwanese-speaking patients. Objectives: This study demonstrates (1) how training in the skill of asking 'perspective checking questions' ('PCQ') can be integrated with language courses by using a 'bottom-up' pedagogy, and (2) what its teaching efficiency is with regard to students' learning of three PCQ types in health education talks. Method: A total of 58 students (medical seniors and juniors, medicine-related majors, and non-medicine majors) used Taiwanese to give two health education sessions about an illness, before and after the training, to a 70-year-old Taiwanese-speaking person. The training is a three-hour course with activities following the 'bottom-up' principle. Two researchers coded students' use of three PCQ types- knowledge ('do you know anything about diabetes'), socio-psycho characteristics ('do you smoke'), and response ('do you have any questions'). The data was examined by a Wilcoxon sign rank test, Kruskal-Wallis test, and McNemar's test. Results: No significant differences were observed among the four groups' use of PCQs in the two sessions. All groups made significant advances in using PCQs (p＜0.05). Response checking was more commonly done than knowledge and socio-psycho characteristics checking before the teaching, but with the training, the total number of users of the latter two approaches increased significantly (p＜0.01). Implications: The training of information-transfer skills can be integrated with medical dialect courses. This integration also worked on learners with limited medical knowledge. While the skill of response-checking can be easily retrieved from our teaching/learning experience, those of knowledge and characteristics checking require more training.

並列關鍵字

information-transfer skills ； perspective checking questions ； health education talks ； medical Taiwanese ； bottom-up teaching approach

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