Doctor-Patient Communication Skills

Patient behavior in response to and coping with illness is a complex process and outcome of complex interaction of personal attributes and perceptions, societal and economic factors as well as experience with health care system in terms of availability and effectiveness.(173-179)Understanding behavior, views and coping with disease after real life experience is expected and deemed necessary to modify patient doctor and patient health care system interaction and improve accommodation among the three and hence improve patient outcome. How did patients with cancer express themselves when requested to respond to certain questions is discussed here. Most of the patients received the information about the diagnosis at first time from the doctors

Therefore, an urgent need for teaching of communication clinical skills to be incorporated into medical school curriculums and continued into postgraduate training and courses in continuing medical education. (179) As it is a fact that, most of medical schools in the world considerer communication skills training courses as important as other clinical subjects themselves (233), in contrast in our style of medical school in Iraq where the communication skills training is neither a separate entity in the curriculum of medical school nor given sufficient avenue within the clinical sessions. This results in poor communication skills in our clinical practice which ended with these disappointed outcomes shown in the present

Other enabling factors or advice from others were behind such behavior which are attributed to low patient awareness about his disease and his trust in the local health care efficiency which account for about 25% of causes of seeking medical care abroad. It seems that a substantial part of such behavior (not necessarily unacceptable) stemmed from some kind of unmet patient expectation and satisfaction. Regarding explanation of the disease condition, symptoms and discussion of management by the doctors to the patients, though the figures in our study are very high, but might be biased by the low knowledge of patient about what should he or she know about his or her disease and what are his or her rights in decision making about the management