The UK Council of Clinical Communication in Undergraduate Medical Education
We are a community of practice: communication teachers who lead clinical communication/consultation skills programmes for undergraduate medical students. Our 129 council representatives come from 45 medical schools across the length and breadth of the UK. We provide a place to collaborate and network with colleagues across the UK. We share a passion for effective and engaging person-centred communication training for our future doctors.
The teaching and assessment of clinical communication have become central components of undergraduate medical education in the UK. Read more about this in our consensus statement on the content for an undergraduate clinical communication curriculum
Our aims
What our members say
University of Nottingham
City St Georges University
University of East Anglia
Edinburgh Medical School
What is Clinical Communication?
The General Medical Council requires all doctors to be able to communicate effectively, recognizing that patients are individuals with diverse needs. Doctors need to listen to patients and work in partnership with them, communicating sensitively and considerately supporting patients to engage in meaningful dialogue, meeting language and communication needs. Good team communication is also essential, for continuity of patient care.
To facilitate these outcomes and to help our undergraduate medical students become effective communicators, teaching and assessing clinical communication is central to undergraduate medical education in the UK.
The key domains of clinical communication teaching are outlined in the Communication Curriculum consensus statement and curriculum wheel, based on over 30 years of accumulated research, and underpinned by principles of professionalism, ethics, evidence-based and reflective practice.
The Electronic Patient Record
As patients have a right to access their medical records, including online access to their electronic patient record (EPR), clinicians need to be mindful of the impact on the reader of what is written and therefore the potential effect on the doctor-patient relationship.
Members of the UKCCC Electronic Patient Record (EPR) writing group for educators, healthcare professionals and medical students have produced a student guide to writing in the EPR. The guide helps medical students to write good quality entries, which fulfil the need of clinical communication, are medico-legally appropriate, and have the patient in mind, who is entitled to access their records. The medical student guide to writing in the EPR can be downloaded and distributed for practice and teaching.
How we responded during the Covid 19 pandemic: A case study
The sudden national imperative to change to remote teaching methods and/or social distancing was a challenge shared across all the UK medical schools and required strategic planning, innovation and evidence sharing.
The UKCCC held monthly online meetings between May 2020 and June 2021to discuss the challenges of teaching and learning clinical and communication skills with social distancing in place.
We learned valuable lessons. Our participant teachers got ideas and support, and our participating medical schools and their medical students gained the conversion of their curricula to effective online delivery, flipped classroom approaches to learning clinical skills and the minimisation of COVID risk in classes taught in person.
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Why join and become a member of the UKCCC?
Talking History: UKCCC, past to present
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