Assessment of Confidence in Communication Skills and Its Practice With Patients Among Medical Professionals in Trichy, India

Introduction One of the most fundamental aspects of medicine is the doctor-patient relationship. Many factors influenced this link, including socio-cultural patterns, economic levels, political systems, and health systems. In India, there is an increase in violence toward physicians. Almost every now and then, the newspaper comes with headlines about a doctor being abused by patients or their families. Concerns regarding the absence of good doctor-patient communication among Indian doctors prompted an assessment of the current situation. The major purpose of this study is to assess the confidence of tertiary care hospital interns and post-graduates in their communication skills. Materials and methods In May and June 2021, a cross-sectional survey was conducted among all interns and post-graduates from various departments at a tertiary care hospital and research center in Trichy, Tamil Nadu, India. The questions were designed to measure the confidence of physicians' communication with patients. The Likert scale was used to rate the "confidence in using" and "actual use" of communication skills with patients, which constitute two sections in our questionnaire. Google forms were used to collect data. The information was then exported to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. SPSS software version 22.0 was used to analyze the data. Results For confidence in their communication skills, the participants obtained a mean score of 2.98 (S.D. = 0.44). Participants obtained an average score of 2.28 (S.D. = 0.89) for practicing confident communication with patients. It was found that persons who had higher confidence levels had a negative correlation (ρ = -0.318) with that during their communication with patients and this was statistically significant (p-value = < 0.001) Conclusion Despite having confident communication skills, medical practitioners in India hardly ever practice them with their patients. This gap must be explored by conducting qualitative studies to address effective communication skills among health professionals.