Many health professions now teach communication to undergraduate students. Yet the provision of common learning objectives in communication for health care professionals across disciplines is still rare despite considerable overlap in the core communication process skills used by the different professional groups.

tEACH has therefore developed the first, international list of core topics for a unified curriculum for teaching communication skills for students in health professions (e.g. nursing, medicine, dentistry, psychology, pharmacy, physiotherapy) based on a European consensus of 121 experts.

The newly developed Health Professions Core Communication Curriculum (HPCCC) is organized around three central themes:

– Communication with patients
– Intra- and interpersonal communication (Professionalism and Reflection)
– Communication in healthcare teams (Professional Communication)

The statement aims to guide communication teachers in all health care disciplines helping them to develop, refine and evaluate what should be taught as part of their own communication curriculum.

Access to the HPCCC in English can be found here. The HPCC has been translated into several different languages to help teachers use this tool in their own countries and institutions. Languages available include: French, German, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Spanish, Russian and Greek. A Portuguese version will be available soon.

A manuscript in Patient Education and Counseling describing the consensus process and the HPCCC can be accessed here.

To find out more about the Core Curriculum subgroup and future efforts related to the HPCCC, please go to the Core Curriculum group page.