Found in Translation: Exporting Patient-Centered Communication and Small Group Teaching Skills to China
Benjamin
Blatt, Gene
Kallenberg, Forrest
Lang, Patrick
Mahoney, JoEllen
Patterson, Beverly
Dugan, Shaobang
Sun
Abstract
The Chinese Medical Doctor’s Association asked us to develop a train-the-trainers program in doctor-patient communication and in teaching skills for a select group of Chinese health care professionals, who would then serve as trainers for practicing physicians throughout China. The request came in the context of increasing doctor-patient friction related, in part, to the dissolution of the socialist health care safety net in China. In this article we recount the implementation of our 5-day training program in Beijing. We explore cross-cultural issues that arose in presenting the program’s two principal training domains: small group teaching and patient-centered doctor-patient communication. We also explore the linguistic challenges we encountered as non-Chinese speaking teachers. Finally, we reflect on the lessons learned from this project that may be of value to others called upon to export Western doctor-patient communications training to other cultures. In this age of increasing globalization, cross-cultural sharing of medical education represents a growing trend. Keywords: Cross-cultural faculty development, doctor-family-patient communication, doctorpatient relationship, China, small group teaching
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Medical Education Online ISSN 1087-2981
This journal is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. Responsible editors: David J Solomon and Ann Frye.