During the past decade, interpersonal skill training programs designed to improve doctorpatient relationships have proliferated in medical schools. Psychologists have been actively involved in designing, implementing, and evaluating these programs. Although most of these programs have produced pre-post gains, they have failed to produce long-term positive outcomes. This article generates hypotheses for this failure and presents three ideas for achieving long-term effectiveness in these training programs: (a) incorporating developmental tasks for professional development into training designs, (b) anticipating and intervening effectively with students' resistance to becoming more intimate with patients, and (c) redesigning the medical school environment to support training objectives.
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