While teaching communication skills during clinical training is important in order to reinforce communication skills learned in formal courses and develop new skills, clinical supervisors can find this task challenging to accomplish. The primary focus of this course will be on approaches to incorporating teaching about communication into the clinical workplace, such as in clinics and on hospital wards where learners participate in patient care. This course will explore “informal” clinical communication teaching opportunities such as role modeling, observation and responding to patient presentations in the clinical workplace. The course will be highly interactive and participant centred, with a mixture of experiential learning and didactic teaching. Participants will share their experiences and concerns regarding opportunities, strategies and challenges for communication teaching in the clinical setting and/or training and empowering clinical supervisors to emphasize communication skills during clinical teaching. The course is directed towards teachers of health professionals (for example medical students, nurses, physiotherapists, doctors) who are engaged in clinical supervision of learners as well as educators involved in supporting clinical training.

Course Objectives:

• To describe challenges and obstacles to teaching communication skills in clinical context
• To use teachable moments in a busy clinical environment
• To provide feedback to learners in an effective and efficient manner

Content and format

The primary focus of this course will be on approaches to incorporating teaching about communication into the clinical workplace, such as in clinics and on hospital wards where learners participate in patient care. While teaching communication skills during clinical training is important in order to reinforce communication skills learned in formal courses and develop new skills, clinical supervisors can find this task challenging to accomplish. This course will explore “informal” clinical communication teaching opportunities such as role modeling, observation and responding to patient presentations as well as more formal one to one and small group approaches.

The course will be highly interactive and participant centred, with a mixture of experiential learning and didactic teaching:
• Participants will share their experiences and concerns regarding opportunities, strategies and challenges for communication teaching in the clinical setting and/or training and empowering clinical supervisors to emphasize communication skills during clinical teaching.
• Participants will also have the opportunity to practice and share a variety of approaches to workplace based communication skills teaching.
• Group problem solving will seek to address obstacles that participants face in attempting to emphasize communication skills during clinical training.
• All participants will be given the opportunity to identify how insights from the course can be practically implemented in their specific institutional setting and what they perceive as the most important take home points from the course.

It will be facilitated by experienced teachers from the tEACH Courses and Support for Trainers committee. The proceedings will be held in English and as much as possible will accommodate participants for whom English is not their first language.

Facilitators

Marcy Rosenbaum
University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine, USA
Marcy Rosenbaum, PhD, is Professor of Family Medicine at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine in the US. She is currently the President of EACH and former co-chair of tEACH, the teaching committee of EACH. She has conducted research on and taught about clinical communication and medical education for over 30 years with a particular emphasis on workplace based communication learning.

Jane Ege Møller
Department of Clinical Medicine, Aarhus University, Denmark
Jane Ege Møller, PhD, is Associate Professor at Department of Clinical Medicine, Aarhus University in Denmark and the Academic Manager of the clinical communication skills courses for residents in Central Denmark Region. She is currently the co-chair of tEACH, the teaching committee of EACH.  She has done several training and research projects on workplace based communication training, and has more than 15 years of experience in the field of clinical communication and medical education.

Registrations will open soon

Maximum capacity: 18

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