Intercultural doctor-patient communication in daily outpatient care: relevant communication skills.

Introduction: Intercultural communication (ICC) between doctors and patients is often associated with misunderstandings and dissatisfaction. To develop ICC-specific medical education, it is important to find out which ICC skills medical specialists currently apply in daily clinical consultations.
Methods: Doctor-patient consultations of Dutch doctors with non-Dutch patients were videotaped in a multi-ethnic hospital in the Netherlands. The consultations were analyzed using the validated MAAS-Global assessment list in combination with factors influencing ICC, as described in the literature.
Results: In total, 39 videotaped consultations were analyzed. The doctors proved to be capable of practising many communication skills, such as listening and empathic communication behaviour. Other skills were not practised, such as being culturally aware and checking the patient's language ability.
Conclusion: We showed that doctors did practice some but not all the relevant ICC skills and that the ICC style of the doctors was mainly biomedically centred. Furthermore, we discussed the possible overlap between intercultural and patient-centred communication. Implications for practice could be to implement the relevant ICC skills in the existing communication training or develop a communication training with a patient-centred approach including ICC skills.
Competing Interests: Conflict of interestE. Paternotte, F. Scheele, M.C. Seeleman, L. Bank, A.J.J.A. Scherpbier and S. van Dulmen declare that they have no competing interest, no financial competing interests and no non-financial competing interests.The study was performed according to Dutch privacy legislation. Approval of the Dutch medical-education ethics board was obtained for this observational study (NVMO-ERB 355). Beforehand, all participating doctors and patients were informed about the aim and the procedure of the study. All participants signed an informed consent form before the recording of the consultation was started.