Lessons from Successes in Medical Communication Training and Their Applications to Accounting Education

Abstract

Accountants interact with people from diverse backgrounds. While accounting knowledge and technical skills are essential, it is well-developed interpersonal skills that will enhance their relationships with clients and staff alike. Similarly, patients want their doctors to have extensive medical knowledge and an agreeable bedside manner. To address this, professional communication training forms part of the education of doctors and has been extensively researched. Employers of accounting graduates are looking for students with well-developed interpersonal skills. However, concerns continue about how well accounting education has addressed this need. In addition, research on approaches to improve accountants' interpersonal skills is limited. This paper seeks to raise awareness that successes in medical professional communication training may be drawn on to help frame an interpersonal skills training approach appropriate for accounting education. Also provided are two appendices that may assist accounting educators. One takes a medical communication model and suggests how it might be adapted to understand accountant–client interactions, while the other summarises the key issues to be considered in implementing interpersonal skills training including listing some helpful resources.

Keywords:

• Accountants' communication
• education of accountants
• interpersonal skills
• medical communication training

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to acknowledge the helpful advice on earlier versions of this manuscript from the Editor, the anonymous reviewers as well as Steven Dellaportas, Peter Morey and Nina Hearn. Thanks are also due to the author's physician, Dr Clare van Rooy.

Notes

The term ‘communication’ is used in various ways by different writers: some use it as encompassing all types of communication, written, non-verbal and oral; while others use it to refer to presentations to groups and use the term ‘interpersonal communication’ to refer to conversations and discussions. In relation to medical studies the term ‘communication’ is generally used in a narrower sense to describe interactions between health care providers and patients (i.e. interpersonal communication).

Although communication issues are important for accountants in whatever setting in which they are employed, for the sake of brevity this paper will focus on public accountant–client interactions. The primary context for such interactions is considered to be face-to-face information gathering and advisory meetings.

A standardised patient is an actor or lay person trained to portray a patient scenario in a standardised and consistent fashion (Burrows, 1993).

While OSCEs vary, often they are an organisation of stations where students attend each station for 5–10 minutes and perform a standardised clinical task under the observation of one or two examiners (Newble, 2004).

That is, high CA (high levels of communication anxiety) were related to low communication skills.