Revista de patología y terapia del habla

Abstracto

Communicative Competences in Professors and Health Professionals Education: An Exploratory Study

Chenia Caldeira Martinez, Léia Gonçalves Gurgel, Cleidilene Ramos Magalhães

Objective: The aim was to verify students’ opinion regarding communication competence in health education.

Methods: This is an exploratory study, with data collected by questionnaire applied to a sample of students from a University in Southern Brazil. Participants included 71 students of graduate schools in biomedicine, physiotherapy, speech therapy, and audiology and 54 students of postgraduate, master and doctoral degrees in health science. All students signed the informed consent document and answered a specific questionnaire developed for this study.

Results: Data were analyzed using content analysis, which is characterized by the observation of communications through objective and systematic procedures of message content description, and also by indicators that allow the assumption of knowledge about the inferred variables of these messages. From a total of 125 participants, 106 (84.8%) were women, with a mean age of 24.8 years (SD=0.41). 119 (95.2%) individuals considered the necessity of communication activities in academic education. Communication skills considered most important were "content expertise", "adequate speech rate" and "adequate speech articulation". The aspects of greatest difficulty were "adequate speech rate", "adequate speech articulation" and "interaction with the public". In addition, the participants reported the importance of communicative competence in oral presentations and conversations, and also the lack of these communication abilities in the academic and work environment.

Conclusion: Participants reported difficulties and lack of training in this area. This can be remedied with communicative competence activities at the University. Such interventions favor professional success, as the healthcare professional needs to maintain a good relationship with clients/patients, and also need to express themselves in meetings, public speaking activities, and scientific events. Therefore, communication is an essential skill in the health work process. It should be noted that convenience sampling is one of the study’s limitation. This study can help students identify difficulties that may hinder their full educational process and the use of appropriate strategies to overcome these difficulties. Furthermore, the creation of validated and standardized scales to measure these communication skills become essential for the development of this field of study.