The Importance of teaching and assessing communication skills in medical education

Abstract

Effective communication between the patient and the healthcare professional is at the core of delivering high-quality healthcare. It enhances healthcare quality and can change the patients‘ perception of a disease considerably (Fong Ha & Longnecker 2010). This issue of South-East Asian Journal of Medical Education features two original research papers (Sari et al., 2014; Susilo et al., 2014), and a short communication (Rahim et al., 2014) based on different aspects of teaching and assessment of communication skills, highlighting their importance in medical education.