The Role of Psychological Readiness for Doctor-Patient Communication in the Professional Development of Medical Students

Abstract

The problem of the formation of the communicative competence of a professional is at the heart of today's psychological science. Communicative competence as a factor of professional success is important, and, thus, scientists have a significant interest to the problems of communicative competence of an individual, but researches of this phenomenon in relation to the various psychological characteristics of the individual, including the features of coping behavior, are not yet sufficient. Within the framework of this article the authors explore the communicative competence of university students through such structural components as: the level of communication skills-building; emotional intelligence, expressed in the ability to master their own emotions, recognizing the other's emotions and influencing them; coping strategies, manifested as an inclination to use strategies related to mastering their own emotions in difficult stressful situations, coping with communicative difficulties. The article highlights the results of an empirical research targeted at the psychological features of the communicative competence of students studying medicine at a Russian regional university. The study involved combined total sample size of 120 medical students with a high academic performance, the interviews with teachers and the analysis of documentation. The study revealed the number of problematic issues related to the communicative competence of medical students. A number of sample size students lack their communicative competence: they provided communicative difficulties, low emotional intelligence (according to the Hall's Emotional Intelligence Quotient), and maladaptive coping strategies (according to the Lazarus "Way of Coping" Questionnaire). All these problematic issues may become an obstacle when building the process of a doctor-to-patient communication, as well as to attaining an advanced proficiency standard. The research offers new insights planned to be used for improving the educational process at the university, for building a psychological program in the university environment with the students' communicative competence being its target.