Doctor-patient communication crucial for quality medical care

Eminent surgeon and Associate Professor of Surgery Liaquat University of Medical and Health Sciences (LUMHS) Jamshoro Dr Faisal Ghani Siddiqui said that doctors need to communicate with patients in an effective manner so that they can deliver quality medical care.
Talking to APP here, Dr Faisal Ghani said that effective communication was a vital skill required to excel in research, education and the two other important fields during post-graduate education. These skills are of vital importance for post-graduate medical students during residency training, he added.
However, most of the literature and studies in this regard in developed countries and information relevant to communication skills of residents working in developing countries was lacking, he added.
Dr Faisal said that the resident doctors in Pakistan have certain unique problems in effectively communicating with patients and they often found it difficult to explain the medical terminologies to patients.
He said that doctors received their training in English, discussed patient related issues with their seniors in English, but were expected to converse in the official language, Urdu or one of the other several regional languages, while discussing problems with patients. He said that the patient’s understanding of the disease and its progression depended upon the patient’s prior knowledge and on their emotional status. Given the low rates of literacy, patients may not be in a position to understand their condition in an appropriate manner, he added.
Further, Dr Faisal elaborated that the world over communication skills were considered as one of the vital skills required in medical practice and recognised as a core competency for undergraduate and post-graduate medical education programmes in developed countries.
He also said that communicating information to patients about their illness formed the basis of an effective interaction between doctors and patient, hence improvement in human interaction could have positive effects on health outcomes.
He said that in order to be an effective doctor, one needed to be confident so that adequate information was retrieved from the patients by addressing their key concerns, and to be able to form an opinion and then provide this understanding directly to the patient about his or her illness.
Moreover, he said that poor communication and working relationship of residents with their seniors and peers could negatively affect their learning and academic environment.
He informed that research was needed to explore possible differences of these professional communication attributes within groups.
Dr Faisal further said that improving communication skills for residents was a challenge for all residency programmes in the country and it was also important that the senior faculty members of individual programmes developed a supportive relationship with residents in order to enhance their academic activities.
He said it was a recognised fact that in both developed and developing countries that the standard of health services that the public expected were not being provided to them. A very high proportion of the population in many developing countries, including Pakistan and especially in rural areas, do not have any access to health services.
He also said that although there people recognised health as a fundamental human right, there was a denial of this right to millions of people who were caught in the vicious circle of poverty and ill health.
Dr Faisal said that the doctor – patient relationship could not flourish without his skill of communication with ordinary people and medically unaware public.
He emphasised on a step-by-step approach where a trainee was taken from a less complicated to a more complex task while saying that the trainee progressively learned more difficult manures till he became an independent expert. He also talked about the basics of evaluation and emphasised that evaluation must be carried out more often during the training period and the competency certification must not be entirely left to the final evaluation.
Dr Faisal said that research produced by local scientists in local circumstances was more useful as it involved interaction with the local population.