Attitudes of medical students towards communication skills studies

Abstract

In their institute authors teach medical communication skills in three languages (Hungarian, English and German) for medical students in the first year of their studies. In order to improve teaching methods, authors wanted to explore the attitudes of students towards the communication skills learning. For this purpose authors applied the Communication Skills Attitudes Scale created by Rees et al., which is an internationally accepted and well adaptable instrument. Aims: In this survey authors wanted to validate the Hungarian and German version of the Communication Skills Attitudes Scale. In addition, their aim was to analyze possible differences between the attitudes of each of the three medical teaching programs. Methods: Questionnaires were filled anonymously at the beginning of the practices. Principal component analysis with varimax rotation was performed to evaluate the attitudes using the SPSS 10.5 version for analysis. Results: Authors created a model consisting of 7 factors. Factors were the following: 1: respect and interpersonal skills; 2: learning; 3: importance of communication within medical profession; 4: excuse; 5: counter; 6: exam; 7: overconfidence. It was found that students had mainly positive attitudes. Except the learning factor, all other factors showed significant differences between the three medical teaching programs. Conclusions: although students had mainly positive attitudes toward learning communication skills, there were negative attitudes which can be partly modified by improving the teaching methods. However, results may create a proper base for further research to help improving communication skills teaching methods of the authors. Orv. Hetil., 2011, 152, 1535–1543.