Teaching approaches in medicine made easier

Teaching professional attitudes and basic clinical skills to medical students: a practical guide. Jochanan Benbassat. Springer, 2015 (143 pp, €51.99). ISBN 9783319200880.

Training, learning styles, role modelling and behaviours vary among doctors. As a result, students experience different approaches to teaching, which later shape their own approaches to patient interviewing, data collection and problem solving as doctors. Some doctors encourage patients’ narratives by using open-ended questions; others favour closed questions. This can leave medical students confused by the different techniques.

Teaching professional attitudes and basic clinical skills to medical students: a practical guide aims to help tutors, clinicians and teachers by providing an approach to teaching patient interviews, physical examination and clinical reasoning and by bringing the reader closer to the behavioural and social sciences.

The book is easy to read and provides a thorough description of the paradigm shift seen in the teaching of medicine in recent decades. It includes analyses of the difficulties in teaching patient interview and communication techniques, physical examination, data recording and clinical reasoning, and gives insightful and well researched pedagogical suggestions for different approaches to teaching aimed at improving students’ learning. The tables included help readers to quickly summarise the differences in teaching approaches, suggested priorities and important learning outcomes.

The book was written by Jochanan Benbassat, Professor of Medicine and Chair of Sociology of Health at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, from 1992 to 1997 and currently a research associate at the Myers-JDC-Brookdale Institute in Jerusalem.