Learner-centered interactive methods for improving communication skills.

In the Outcomes Project, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) mandated that all medical specialties ensure that its residents develop competency in different areas including “interpersonal and communication skills”. The Psychiatry Residency Review Committee of ACGME fixed additional requirements for psychiatrists who also need to demonstrate competency in CBT and four other different kinds of psychotherapy (ACGME, 2000). This implies that communication and CBT are considered core skills in the curriculum of mental health providers . How then are communication and interpersonal skills best learnt?Experiential learning approach is the mainstay of communication skills teaching. But why? It is clearly a resource intensive and expensive approach to teaching. Are such interactive methods really necessary? Why not teach this by lecture, by reading or by e-learning? Do we know that traditional apprenticeship or didactic teaching methods by themselves won’t bring about the same changes in behaviours and skills? Why when experiential methods are potentially more challenging and threatening to the learner do we insist on their use? In this chapter, we explore how learners can improve their communication skills, the evidence behind the necessity for using experiential interactive learning and the different approaches that can lead to behavioural change in communication skills.