Learning Communication Skills in General Practice: From self-directed, transformative learning to develop personal style

Abstract

Communication skills play an important role and drive the clinical outcome in general practice. Unfortunately, biomedicine is growing, and communication skill is often overlooked as easy or self-explanatory. Learning these skills in general practice isn’t like procedural skills training. Besides understanding the theory and clinical process of communication skills, we have to know why and how. This article briefly organizes the conceptual model and shows how to learn communication skills in general practice. Self-directed learning drives the learner who takes their own way to learn. A trained teacher also can provide constructive feedback and carry out a needs-assessment of the learner. Through transformative learning, the learner can understand the five key steps of communication skills in general practice and transfer the learned skills into clinical practice by their own process. The five key steps include medical humanities, principles of family medicine/general practice, clinical methods, counseling micro skills, and clinical applications. The aim is to find the personal learning method and clinical consultation style for each physician.