Fostering Interpersonal Skills in a Healthcare Context

This professional book reports on the development, implementation, evaluation, and further improvement of an innovative training program for preceptors (tutors) and residents in a specific healthcare context. It draws on key literature in internationally recognized journals and books, uses important legal considerations from the local context, and applies well-established principles from longitudinal and mixed-methods research. It also provides a coherent review of the state-of-the-art of the literature on the matter, outcomes of a three-year project in which research was longitudinally integrated into two training programs—one for preceptors (tutors) and one for residents—as well as lessons learned from this project. Practitioners and local healthcare providers can learn step-by-step how to work toward truly innovative training programs for their professionals and residents and how to develop a culture based on human professional values as well as continuous quality improvement. Simultaneously, researchers can learn how to integrate research into training programs in order to create better programs and establish a sustainable line of research that responds to social accountability questions of local healthcare providers. Finally, this book helps politicians to acquire an in-depth understanding of what it takes to innovate teaching and training in a healthcare system that has been under tremendous pressure and how funding in near future may be allocated in order to facilitate that innovation and its future. While this book focuses on a local healthcare context, the training programs and empirical studies around it as presented in the book can be replicated in local healthcare settings anywhere else and can be used to facilitate future inter-institutional collaborations for both training and research.