Building Communication Skills Through Community and Compassion

Communication and Interpersonal Skills
Our graduates communicate respectfully, effectively, and compassionately to meet the medical, educational, and social needs of their patients, colleagues, and communities.

Not all learning objectives can be taught in a lab or from a textbook. Some require real-world experiences and human connection. For third-year University of California San Diego School of Medicine student, Shanaya Sidhu, their experiences outside the traditional classroom setting are enhancing course objectives to prepare them to be an empathetic and active listener.

A student manager and volunteer at the Student-Run Free Clinic Project and a member of the Harm Reduction International Health Collective, Sidhu says that being around people in a variety of settings is providing experiences and opportunities to enhance and improve their communication skills.

Third-year medical student Shanaya Sidhu (left) notes that becoming a better listener is preparing them to be a better care provider. Photo courtesy of Shanaya Sidhu.

“There doesn’t have to be a separate dedicated clinical experience to learn how to communicate,” Sidhu said. “Through the free clinic and harm reduction outings, we interact with people with different literacy levels and different backgrounds. Just traveling around San Diego and getting to know our community and our neighbors is a really helpful way to sharpen our communication skills which will help us when we’re working in a clinical setting.”

While the extracurricular activities have proven helpful to enhancing their skills, Sidhu also has noted that simulated experiences and trainings have also addressed the needs for effective communication and interpersonal skills. Each medical student is enrolled in a course entitled Compassionate Action and Real Engagement in the community (CARE). The core course provides first- and second-year medical students with the skills needed to sustain a humanistic approach to medicine.

“The goal of the CARE course is to help students retain the empathy and compassion that brought them to medicine in the first place,” said Lisa Eyler, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Psychiatry and director of the Center for Empathy and Compassion Training in Medical Education at the T. Denny Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion. “Each of the classroom sessions has a different topic and consists of an introductory didactic or panel for the full group of students, followed by facilitated small group breakout sessions focused on arts- and humanities-based activities, building connection, processing and practice with clinical vignettes.”

For Sidhu, one particular session in the CARE course, the Compassionate Upstander Training, proved to be incredibly impactful.  

“We learned skills to help us communicate in situations where we might feel emotionally triggered or are dealing with more sensitive situations,” they said. “The more well-rounded we become, the better we can care for each other.”

The training includes an introduction about the ways that unintentional slights and insensitive comments can negatively impact the health care workplace and the benefits of being an upstander versus just a bystander when such instances occur.

“In small groups, facilitators share information about the difference between ‘calling in language’ versus ‘calling out language’,” Eyler explained. “Students then practice how they might call someone in about their actions based on a particular video scenario and discuss potential challenges to doing so and how these might be overcome."

“Active and empathetic listening are clinical tools that maybe aren’t a part of our tool belt in the same way that a physical exam or labs, imaging and history are. I think if we practice active and empathetic listening, we can make people feel safer. If patients feel safer, providers can elicit information that's important to improving their health,” said Sidhu. “As a medical student, we are not going to be the expert in the room with all the clinical knowledge, but we can show up in ways that are intentional, make space for patients and advocate for them by really listening to what they have to say.”

Sidhu has already experienced opportunities to listen and engage with people in some of their deepest times of need. They recalled opportunities in their psychiatry selective course learning that if you have a patient expressing suicidal ideation, sometimes the best course of action could be to take a step back and just really listen.

“It’s not always about what you say, or how you respond, but how you listen,” they said. “If you listen closely, you can sometimes feel that weight emotionally being lifted from a person.”