The next generation of doctors

Our Toastmaster's club was invited to give a presentation today to a group of medical students about improving your public speaking skills. The group that invited us to speak was the Asian Pacific American Medical Student Association, so we were expecting the crowd to be quite a few non-native English speakers, but we were impressed by how many American students were there. They seemed to realize that public speaking skills are important to their profession and that they need to build those skills and were willing to give up their lunch hour to learn more (though the fact that the club had food helps).

Ellen, a seasoned Toastmaster, started things off by talking about getting over the fear of public speaking. My assignment was to talk about impromptu speaking, which is relevant to these soon-to-be doctors because they will often find themselves in an impromptu speaking situation when a patient asks an unexpected question. I tried to integrate research about physician-patient communication into my talk, including the 1984 Annals of Internal Medicine study which found that doctors usually only wait on average 18 seconds before interrupting a patient who is talking (JAMA replicated the study in 1999 and they had improved to 23 seconds). The students seemed receptive and appreciative of the presentation. I even got a few brave souls to practice an impromptu speaking exercise.

When I told my boss what I was doing today, he said: "Tell them the two most important things are to think before you speak and to listen. Some students, and even some doctors, never seem to get that." It made me feel good to see that perhaps the next generation of doctors will keep trying to improve communication skills.