Communication skills & overseas medical graduates

Formal communication skills teaching and training has been a feature of undergraduate medical education now for over two decades and, for postgraduate training, for over a decade in the UK, North America and Australasia. However, as the authors point out, it is generally not a core component of medical education elsewhere in the world. Quite apart from the idealistic aim of providing a better service to patients, there is also a financial imperative for organizations employing or indemnifying medical practitioners to ensure high-level communication skills, given that a large proportion of patient complains are at least in part attributable to issues of failed communication early on in the process.

Either one believes (as I do and the GMC purports to do) that formally-taught modules are an important part of developing doctors' and medical students' communications skills (in which case there has to be some kind of remedial training established for overseas doctors graduating from medical schools or postgraduate specialty training programmes where this was not the case), or one has to believe that communication skills training is a modern ‘educationalists fad’ and that actually learning ‘on the job’ through interacting with patients and colleagues is the only worthwhile way forward.

If one believes the former (as I do and the GMC purports to do), then the present situation exposes foreign medical graduates to an unnecessarily high risk of stress, litigation and disciplinary action, at least during initial phase of their working careers in the UK. If one doesn't believe it (as these non-UK medical schools presumably feel) then it has to be assumed that UK medical graduates are missing out on invaluable elements of education in human disease that have been displaced from the UK curriculum through greater focus on ‘soft skills’.