Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
The Educational Review, cilt.8, sa.6, ss.886-895, 2024 (Hakemli Dergi)
Objectives: Having effective communication skills is crucial for physicians/dentists to provide quality and sensitive care to patients and to experience job satisfaction. Therefore, it is necessary to provide dentistry students with training that will increase their communication skills during their undergraduate education. The aim of this study is to examine the curriculum of dentistry faculties in Turkey in terms of communication education, to reveal the current situation, and to emphasize the necessity of expanding communication courses in the curriculum. Materials and Methods: The subjects investigated include whether the communication course is compulsory or elective, whether the elective course is actively offered, what the weekly credit and total hours are, the semester in which it is taught, and the specialization of the instructor teaching the course. Content analysis was performed on the data obtained from the study. Results: There are fifty-seven communication courses in thirty-eight (50.7%) of seventy-seven dentistry faculties in Turkey. Communication courses are offered as compulsory courses in nine faculties (15.8%) and as elective courses in twenty-eight faculties (78.9%). Communication courses are generally taught for one hour (27.2%) or two hours (24.3%) per week, and during the education period, the intensity is between fourteen (16.5%) and twenty-eight hours (13.6%). Only six of those who teach the communication courses are communication specialists (10.5%). Conclusion: Communication education should be provided to dentistry students as a compulsory course and communication courses should be expanded throughout the curriculum by improving their content every following year.
Keywords
Education of communication skills, undergraduate dental education, physician/dentist-patient communication, curriculum evaluation