Communication in patient–physician relationship in Turkey: opinions of family medicine residents

Introduction
Healthy patient–physician communication (PPC) affects the effectiveness of the service, increases satisfaction with health services and ensures cooperation with patient. Research has revealed that there are communication problems between physicians and patients, and patients mostly complain about physicians’ communication skills. Objectives. We aim to determine the opinions of family medicine residents about PPC, uncover communication problems in Turkey and also find out if having communication education has an effect on these problems.

Material and methods
The data was collected by surveys which were sent to family medicine residents via the Internet, and each resident could answer just one survey. For analyses, we used the IBM SPSS15.0 package program. P < 0.05 was considered statistically significant.

Results
312 (11.3%) out of 2,765 family medicine residents in Turkey participated in this study. The majority of residents were female (73.1%). More than half of the residents (63.5%) had received training about communication. Most of the residents indicated that they had communication problems with patients or patients’ relatives (88.4%). Most of the residents (73.7%) said “Yes, definitely” to the question “Do you think there is a communication problem between patients and physicians in Turkey?”. No significant difference was found between trained and untrained residents. The most frequent answers to reasons for communication problems were limited time (50.6%), socio-cultural level of the patient (20.5%) and heavy workload of physicians (20.5%).

Conclusions
Most residents indicated that they had communication problems with patients or patients’ relatives before, and there is a serious communication problem between patients and physicians in Turkey. In this study, there was no significant difference between whether residents had received training about communication and those having problems in this area.