Letters
Patient centred care of diabetes in general practice
Doctors and nurses must understand meaning of "communication"
Study failed to measure patient centredness of GPs' consulting
behaviourMight difference in prescribing explain some of the findings?Authors' replyDoctors and nurses must understand meaning of "communication"
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
EDITOR
In Kinmonth et al's randomised controlled trial of patient
centred care of diabetes one group of health professionals (the
intervention group) received training in patient centred care while the
other (the comparison group) did not.1 Subsequently, scores on quality of communication with patients favoured the intervention group, but scores on patients' knowledge about their disease favoured the comparison groupto put it crudely, patients assigned to the intervention group were relatively happy but ignorant.
Sadly, the straightforward paradox of saying, in effect, "he
communicates well but tells you nothing" is all but lost in the way
that the word communication is used in medical education these days.
Indeed, in a manner that many medical educators would find unexceptionable, Kinmonth et al gloss this term as meaning "the ability to tell the doctor or nurse personal or troubling things and
feeling understood"as if the transfer of information from
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