Skills for Communicating with Patients, Third Edition is one of two companion books on improving communication in medicine, which together provide a comprehensive approach to teaching and learning communication skills throughout all levels of medical education in both specialist and family medicine. Since their publication, the first edition of this book and its companion, "Teaching and Learning Communication Skills in Medicine," have become established standard texts in communication skills teaching throughout the world.
This substantially expanded third edition has been fully updated in relation to the current literature and revised to reflect the explosion of research on healthcare communication. It incorporates considerable evidence in support of the skills of the Calgary-Cambridge Guides, offering a comprehensive and now even more evidence-based delineation of the skills that make a difference when communicating with patients. The book explores the specific skills of doctor-patient communication and provides wide-ranging evidence of the improvement that those skills can make to health outcomes and everyday clinical practice. It is unique in providing a secure platform of core skills which represent the foundations of doctor-patient communication.
Jonathan Silverman is a professor of English at UMass Lowell. He is the editor of Astros and Asterisks: The Houston Sign-Stealing Scandal, Explained.
He is the co-author with Michael Hinds of Johnny Cash International: How and Why the World Loves the Man in Black (University of Iowa Press, 2020), which is the winner of the 2023 Peggy O'Brien Book Prize.
He is also author of Nine Choices: Johnny Cash and American Culture (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010); the co-author with Dean Rader of The World Is a Text: Writing, Reading, and Thinking about Culture and Its Contexts (Pearson/Broadview, 2002-2018, five editions); and the co-editor with Meghan Sweeney of Remaking the American College Campus (McFarland, 2016).
He has served as the Fulbright Roving Scholar in Norway (2007-2008) and was a John H. Daniels fellow at the National Sporting Library (2013-2014). He has published articles on horse racing in The Cambridge Companion to Horseracing, The Journal of Sport History, Poor Yorick, Post, and The End of Austin as part of a larger work on horse racing in progress. He has published work in Prospects, Kugelmass, The Rumpus, The Journal of the American West, and The Journal of Radicalism, and wrote for PBS’s website, Remotely Connected.
The consultation advice is gold. This book has undoubtedly made me a more efficient doctor.
The problem is, the text is dry and dull. You have to wade through so much theory to get to the bits that will improve you as a consulter!
I understand the agenda to promote consultation skills as an evidence-based science; however, the average doctor reading this book just wants to know the useful bits! It's too inaccessible.
A shortened version that cuts out all the evidence and studies would cater better to the target audience, I feel.
I owe this book a debt as it has helped me very much throughout my GP training. I was surprised by the positive results yielded from putting the skills taught into practice.