Editorial: Patient-centered communication skills for health professions education and healthcare

Von Fragstein et al. (1) published an article on the consensus statement of communication skills training for undergraduate medical curricula. This article, never too old to revisit, presented a comprehensive communication curriculum using a visualization of the “wheel.” This Communication Curriculum Wheel showed that throughout the journey of becoming health professionals and beyond, students need to master different tasks of communication skills (e.g., building rapport, exploration, explanation and planning), apply them in various situations of patient encounters (e.g., age-specific communication, sensitive issues, dealing with uncertainty, handling mistakes), able to use different media in communication (e.g., face-to-face, telephone, written), and involve different stakeholders (e.g., family or other health professionals). At the very center of the wheel, the authors placed “respect for others,” which strongly urges all health professionals to reflect that respect is the basis of all communication (1). In health care, we translate respect as patient-centered communication.