Indian Journal of Public Health Research & Development

In our country, the doctor-patient relationship has declined immensely and is portrayed as outburst of violence against doctors. Enhancing patient centeredness has been the toughest part of health care as there is no specific medical school curricula that augment their competency in social and communication skills.

1)To assess the self-rating of communication skills of the interns with the patients. 2)To objectively assess the communication skills of interns during their patient interaction. 3)To find if there is any correlation existing within the spectrum of communication skills being observed.

Forty interns of Aarupadai Veedu Medical College and Hospital, Puducherry were enrolled in August-September 2016. MAAS global rating list and Conversation Skill Rating Scale(CSRS) were used respectively for objective assessment and perception of their inherent patient-interaction skills.

Young doctors rated them as an average conversationalist, socially semi-skilled, moderately competent and also partially appropriate and effective in the way they communicate with the patients (overall average score of 3.6/7). They were slightly above average (score 4/6) in being attentive, physically examining and managing illness in addition to being empathetic, informative to patients, in spite of having inadequate exploratory skills (score 3/6). When a young doctor thinks of being socially skilled, he/she delivers himself/herself as an excellent conversationalist and a competent communicator as evident from significantly positive Spearman's correlation coefficient (P<.05). Doctors who were efficient enough to summarize could endure themselves being better in all the components of a proficient communicator(P<.05).

In order to maximize the significance of inter-personal communication skills among doctors, efforts to imbibe the sessions for skills and inter-personal development in the medical curriculum is indispensible to build a healthy doctor-patient relations in future.