Publications abroad

From the fictional portrait of Dr Gregory House to Jerome Groopman's bestseller How Doctors Think, doctors and the public alike are realising that a doctor's job is more than a technical practice. However, why do so many patients leave surgeries ...

Covering strategies for effective communication, this proven guide offers the tools needed to establish positive relationships with patients and staff. It not only covers respectful action and appropriate decision-making, but also shows how these...

Health communication: new age strategies and skills presents a practical model for the process of developing health communication interventions. The book also explores media contact and how this shapes our conceptions of health and illness. Using...

The REDE model is a conceptual framework for teaching relationship-oriented communication. The model applies specific skills to optimise unique and personal connection. It is based on the premise that authentic connection is an essential therapeutic agent that...

This book contains detailed case studies that demonstrate in-depth applications of communication theory to real-life situations. With chapters written by clinicians as well as communication scientists, the cases included herein...

Public health communicators and health professionals face dilemmas every day. Using studies, this book looks at how messages need to be tailored to meet the unique information needs of...

There is an urgent need to improve doctors' communication skills. Research has shown that poor communication can contribute to patient dissatisfaction, patient non-compliance and increased medico-legal problems. Improved skills...

This book presents practical ways to communicate health messages and is intended to serve as an easy-to-use guide to health communication. In addition, it has won several awards. These include esteemed awards from the American Medical Writers Association....

Life-threatening diseases such as HIV/AIDS also threaten people's sense of identity and taken for granted assumptions about the temporal shape of their lives. In response, people often experience shifts in values, spirituality and life...

Many physicians may feel ill-equipped to deal with the patient's suffering resulting from the ailments associated with chronic illness. This essay takes up the thesis that chronically and terminally ill patients can be healed holistically,...

Reflective writing is one proven method for teaching medical students to interact empathetically with patients. Most such exercises are based on students' reflection on clinical experiences. However, in order to effectively extract, interpret and...

There is now a renewed interest in narrative analysis in the humanities, social sciences and medicine. Disease narratives are of particular interest in health-related settings. This article discusses the background to this interest....

Text analysis theories are applied to understanding medical histories, clinicians and scholars have the opportunity to develop a more nuanced and multi-faceted appreciation of these accounts. A patient's story is rarely 'just a story', but is rather a conscious and unconscious...

The use of narratives, including doctors' and patients' stories, literature and film, is increasingly popular in medical education. However, there is a need for an overarching conceptual framework to guide these efforts, which are often dismissed as...

Researchers and medical educators in the field of doctor-patient communication encourage doctors to elicit patient narratives during medical encounters to facilitate data collection, relationship building and patient satisfaction. However, these scholars convey little ...