The Influence of a Doctor's Social and Professional Experience on Self-Assessment of Communication Skills

The article is devoted to the study of communication skills of a doctor in connection with social experience and length of professional activity. Communication skills are considered as an operational component of physician communication competence and are inextricably linked with solving professional problems in various situations of “doctor - patient” interaction. The authors highlight professional tasks and situations that require the use of communication skills: collecting complaints and anamnesis, informing and explaining the diagnosis and treatment, communicating “bad news”, completing a medical consultation, as well as situations in which the patient does not agree with the proposed treatment, and conflict situations of interaction. The respondents of the study were 86 physicians of state clinical hospitals in Izhevsk, divided into groups by age and experience. The study used the author's questionnaire aimed at identifying self-assessment of physicians' communication skills, methods of mathematical statistics (descriptive statistics, Kolmogorov-Smirnov criterion, Kruskal-Wallis H-test, Spearman rank correlation coefficient). The statistical software package “IBM SPSS Statistica 26.0” was used to process the data. The authors come to the conclusion that it is most difficult for young doctors with up to 3 years of experience to communicate with patients, considering their communication skills insufficient for communicating with patients. At the same time, it was revealed that in the course of professional activity not only effective communication skills can be formed, but also ineffective ones, which requires the creation of educational programs for teaching communication skills in medicine not only in universities, but also in the system of continuous additional education for working doctors.