Beyond Checklists: Teaching Medical Communication as Interaction, Not Procedure

Across medical schools and healthcare institutions, communication skills are typically taught through frameworks, acronyms, and checklists. Learners are coached to “do” patient-centred communication by progressing through prescribed steps, rehearsing role-plays, and being assessed on standardized OSCE items. Yet real consultations seldom follow these scripts. Patients raise new concerns late in the visit, resist recommendations in subtle ways, or express distress indirectly. Procedural teaching can therefore train clinicians to perform the framework while overlooking what patients themselves are making relevant in the moment.

This interactive workshop repositions clinical communication as an emergent, co-constructed interaction rather than a technical procedure. A brief roundtable discussion with Q&A will be conducted to surface key problems with current communication training, including tensions between protocol-driven teaching and the aims of genuine patient-centred care. In the main segment, participants will work with local consultation video clips and transcripts to identify “trouble spots” in actual encounters, and in small mixed groups (clinicians and educators) they will be given the opportunity to analyze why these problems emerge and how they unfold turn by turn.

Then, drawing on conversation analysis and methods such as the Conversation Analytic Role-play Method (CARM), participants will work with authentic consultation data to examine how specific turns-at-talk invite, constrain, or shut down patient participation.

Throughout, the focus will be on cultivating interactional sensitivities—such as recognizing missed cues, responding to resistance, and following patient trajectories—rather than memorizing ideal lines.

Date of Workshop: 24 April 2026
Time: 1:00 PM to 4:30 PM
Location: LKC School of Medicine, Novena Campus
Workshop Fee: $380+

NTU and NHG Staff qualify for a 10% discount, please approach the organiser for the discount code.