Judith Lindeck is a traditional GP partner and trainer as well as training programme director in Cambridge for more years than I want to mention
Recently I have heard senior surgeons bemoaning the fact that doctors starting surgical training, despite being academically extremely able, do not have the manual dexterity of previous doctors. They put it down to the way education has changed. They no longer spend the hours learning the manual skills of writing and sewing that previous generations did.
This got me thinking about GP training. It’s not going to be changing for us, or is it? Are our trainees no longer as well prepared for the interpersonal skills we need?
In our digital age our new recruits will be extremely skilled at digital communication.
Our major skill and talent is communication. The root of our work is the relationship with our patients. In our digital age our new recruits will be extremely skilled at digital communication. The digital realm is their comfort zone. They have developed considerable skill at digital communication. But gone are those days of spending hours talking face to face to friends as a teenager and learning the natural micro communication skills which go with this. This means they feel very comfortable with online consultation, but does this allow for the empathy and understanding a good GP requires? Will this style of communication really support a face to face patient working through a serious life event?
…gone are those days of spending hours talking face to face to friends as a teenager and learning the natural micro communication skills which go with this.
As more and more teaching moves digital the trainee GPs will feel comfortable learning from AI. But AI, by definition does not have empathy. It can make an empathetic statement, “I am so sorry to hear about your loss” but it cannot teach the real emotional response a trainee will feel faced with a real person in an awful situation. The trainees are then not ready for the real-life situations our patients face. Breaking bad news to a real person needs body language and micro consultation skills a computer cannot teach. Our trainees are real human beings and faced with the reality in practice are suddenly faced with a choice of computer-taught platitudes or not knowing what to say. Either is likely to cause stress and moral damage to the doctor, and probably harm to the patient who does not feel understood.
I see increasing numbers of trainees in communication skills training reciting ‘empathetic statements’ which are clearly not their natural response, how does this feel for a real patient? Are we doing our trainees a disservice setting them up to believe this is good communication in the UK
Yes, trainees will feel more comfortable learning in the AI realm, That is where many of us now live. Role play was always frightening and more so now. It may be cheaper to use a well-developed AI simulation than hiring trained simulators, but is it teaching the skills our doctors need for the future? The Simulated Consultation Assessment exam is already online,1 but with real people who can demonstrate real emotion. As educators and qualified GPs we need to decide how far down the AI line we should go, or whether we should be returning to teaching the core communication skills that we honed in our training time to enable our trainees to become expert communicators.
Deputy Editor’s note – see also: https://bjgplife.com/if-ai-can-reflect-what-are-we-assessing/ , https://bjgplife.com/ai-detection-in-gp-training-a-hidden-burden-on-supervisors/ and https://bjgplife.com/ai-does-not-say-implications-of-using-anthropomorphic-language-to-describe-ai-use/
Reference
https://www.rcgp.org.uk/mrcgp-exams/simulated-consultation-assessment [accessed 11/9/26]
Featured Photo by Immo Wegmann on Unsplash
