Clinical skills and PBL Muse Vol 2 (#3): Listening Skills

A major complaint that patients have with doctors is that they do not listen. Efficiency in listening skills however, has attracted little attention in the medical curriculum. How can this skill best be inculcated in medical students?

Preparing medical students to be attentive listeners is the subject of a paper by Boudreau and colleagues in Medical Teacher (2009; 31: 22-29). The authors developed a set of eight core principals of attentive listening. These were then used to design specific teaching modules in the context of curriculum renewal at the Faculty of Medicine, McGill University.

Attentive listening . . .

• is a perceptual, cognitive and social act.
• is an active process.
• is triadic: the speaker, the utterance, and the listener.
• involves focusing on word choice, paralanguage and non verbal cues and signs.
• requires receptiveness, an understanding of how spoken language works, and the ability to move between open-mindedness and an awareness of inference.
• can accomplish the following: reveal the personhood and concerns of the speaker (i.e. the patient); produce diagnostically relevant data; assist in healing.
• is not a neutral act – it can have a positive and negative impact on the patient, physician and their relationship.
• necessitates the formation of new habits.

In their paper the authors provide a sample of activities and tasks that are designed to teach these core principals to first year medical students.

Medical Teacher; Volume 31. Number 6 – June 2009 (2009; 31: 563-568)