When the Patient is Absent in Patient-Centered Communication Training: A Discursive Analysis of How Medical Students Learn to Interact with Patients.

: Patient-centered communication is an ideal for undergraduate medical education and has been for decades. However, medical students often find the patient-centered approach challenging. The present study finds a possible discordance between formal intentions of a medical curriculum and the corresponding learning environment.

'If you had taken the lead…' - a qualitative study of patients with chronic conditions and their perspective in clinical encounters with medical students.

Objectives: To explore what patients with chronic conditions emphasize as important in the patient-medical student conversation, and how the patients' experiences relate to trust.

Methods: Twenty-one video-recorded sessions of patients' feedback in simulation-based communication courses for medical students were observed, transcribed, analyzed inductively and organized into three themes.

Results: In the patients' feedback, three aspects were emphasized as important relating to trust: a) when the medical student relates medical information to the patient's lifeworld, b) when the student leads the patient throughout the conversation, and c) when the patient gets emotional support from the student.