Program duration: 01/09/2015 - 31/08/2018
Health Communication Training for Health Professionals – The H-COM Project
Prolepsis is a partner in a European co-funded project titled “Health Communication Training for Health Professionals, H-COM”. The H-Com project was officially launched on September 1st 2015 and will last for three years. The project coordinator is Nofer Institute of Occupational Medicine, NIOM based in Poland. The consortium comprises 6 partners from 5 countries, namely Poland, Greece, Cyprus, Germany and Spain. Prolepsis Institute is responsible for implementing the project activities in Greece.
The general objective of this project is to build and strengthen communication skills among health professionals (with a focus on medical doctors and nurses) so as to improve patient – professional relations as well as inter-disciplinary communication, while long-term impacts include a positive influence on the health care setting.
Health is among the sectors which are predicted to grow in the coming years. It is expected that a net increase of 1.8 million jobs across the EU will occur between 2013 and 2025. At the same time, effective communication between health care professionals and patients has been found to have a positive impact on readmission rates, understanding treatment options, being more adherent to treatment, following the medication schedule with consistency, cost related impacts and overall positive health outcomes for patients.
Therefore, effective communication among patients and health professionals is crucial and important for the overall effective functioning of the health system. Nevertheless, health communications seems to attract little attention especially during medical and nursing training. Teaching health communication skills to health care professionals is often not given adequate attention during formal education. Also, opportunities to practice such skills during professional life are scarce and often neglected. This is due to workload and clinical work commitments of physicians/nurses but also due to a lack of training opportunities to enhance and develop communication skills.
For decades it was widely accepted that health professionals could acquire communication skills through their clinical practice and their interaction with patients. Since the early ‘70s the communication and interpersonal skills that a medical doctor should have were no longer viewed as a matter of “personal style” emerging from clinical experience with patients, but instead, as a set of measurable and modifiable behaviors that could be taught and evolved. This project aims at training health professionals on these behaviors. It will help respond to many of the challenges in health communication by increasing physicians’ awareness of its importance and by providing educational materials to strengthen communication skills.
More specifically H-COM will:
• Map shortages in existing relevant training
• Explore the needs and perceptions of health professionals and other relevant stakeholders concerning communication
• Develop, test and evaluate training in health communication through formal Vocational Training channels and e-learning tools
• Validate the training program and identify key skills and competencies
• Widely disseminate the training tools, encouraging their exploitation, exchanging best practice and creating networks of cooperation
H-COM aims to improve patient-doctor relationship and ultimately patient health outcomes by focusing on increasing knowledge, building capacity and raising awareness among medical doctors on health communication issues.
Contact information
Services: Education
Project partners
Coordinator:
Nofer Institute of Occupational Health, Poland
Associated Partners:
Institute of Preventive Medicine, Environmental and Occupational Health, Prolepsis, Greece
Technische UniversitΓ€t Dresden, Germany
Universidad de La Laguna, Spain
Centre for Advancement of Research and Development in Educational Technology LTD-CARDET, Cyprus
Cyprus University of Technology, Cyprus
Relative links
http://h-com.eu/#