In every part of the healthcare system, ‘soft skills’ will be the key to achieving progress
Medical education is stuck in old paradigms which are ill-suited to training doctors for the rapid changes the profession faces over the next decade, according to several speakers at this month’s DAS SMACC conference in Berlin.
“The reality for most doctors in training will be that the future will look drastically different to the present, and the problem is we don’t know what the future is going to look like,” said Dr Daniel Cabrera, a Consultant in Emergency Medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
Dr Cabrera said both undergraduate and post-graduate training was ignoring key skills that would be required if doctors were going to be able to adapt to the coming radical changes in how medicine is practiced.
According to Dr Chris Nickson, an intensivist and medical educator at the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, there needed to be a shift in focus to teaching skills that prepared doctors to being adaptable.
“But these skills aren’t the things emphasised in medical learning at present, particularly in post-graduate training and life-long learning programs,” he said.
Dr Nixon said part of the problem was that many of these skills were regarded as “soft” skills which many doctors, particularly those currently in practice, did not regard as important in the context of key medical learning.
“Learning how to learn, critical thinking, how to unlearn things,” were now all critical skills given the context of changes to how doctors would need to work, said Dr Nickson.
“More and more procedural skills will become robotic, or automatic, so we really need to focus in on human interaction, because other jobs will definitely not be existing in the future,” he said.
“Unfortunately, a lot of things required for this we don’t teach well – communication, leadership, how we achieve collective competence in a system. These are very big challenges for medical educators.”
Dr Victoria Brazil, a Gold Coast Hospital emergency physician and previous director of Queensland Medical Education and Training, said a key issue was the continuity between graduate and post-graduate training.
She told the conference that, at least at undergraduate level, the educational pedagogy was sound and that many medical schools were now embracing the idea of doctors being formally educated for skills such as leadership and communication.
But this promising start was being lost at the post-graduate level because that training tended to be overseen by more conservative practising doctors who had a more fixed mindset on ongoing professional training.
“There is a big cultural difference emerging between graduate and post-graduate learning,” Dr Brazil said.
Like Dr Nickson, Dr Brazil said “soft skills”, particularly learning how to learn and unlearn, just were not seen as important by key senior practicing clinicians, and as a result many attempts to seriously teach such skills were tokenistic.
All the conference speakers said that, more than ever, in whatever part of the healthcare system, communication and leadership skills were now core to a doctor’s future progress.
