Clinical communication is the way health professionals gather information, build relationships, explain information and involve people in decisions about their care.
It includes skills such as:
These are professional performance skills, not simply personality traits. Students therefore need opportunities to see effective communication, practise it themselves and receive information about how their communication affects an interaction.
For example, rather than only teaching students a consultation framework, give them a realistic conversation in which they must listen, respond, gather information and explain what happens next. The emphasis is on doing the communication, not merely knowing what good communication should look like.
Explicit communication-skills education improves medical students’ communication performance ➕➕➕➕➕ [1], although effects vary considerably between studies. Personalised or specific feedback has a moderate positive effect on communication performance compared with generic or no feedback ➕➕➕➕ [1].
Evidence from undergraduate nursing points in the same direction. Standardised-patient simulation produces a moderate improvement in communication ➕➕➕➕ [2], and virtual-reality simulation also has a moderate positive effect ➕➕➕➕ [3].
There is no compelling evidence that the technology itself is the key ingredient. Digital approaches have not been shown to be more effective than traditional communication teaching [4], and there is insufficient evidence that professional simulated patients consistently outperform peer role-play [1]. The strongest practical message is therefore to give students opportunities to practise communication and receive targeted feedback on their performance, rather than focusing on one particular delivery method [1,4,5].
This summary is informed primarily by a large Cochrane review of communication-skills interventions, supplemented by meta-analyses in undergraduate nursing and a recent umbrella review of virtual-patient approaches [1–5].
The Cochrane review included 90 controlled studies involving 10,124 medical students [1]. Communication-skills education produced large improvements overall, but effects varied substantially across studies. The more specific analysis of personalised feedback included six studies and 502 students, had moderate heterogeneity and was rated moderate-certainty evidence by the review authors. Because the strongest evidence is restricted to medical students and the broader effects are highly heterogeneous, we rate the overall evidence as moderate quality ➕➕➕.
Two nursing meta-analyses provide useful corroboration [2,3]. Standardised-patient simulation improved communication, but the available studies were largely non-randomised and the communication analysis was heterogeneous [2]. Virtual-reality simulation also produced a moderate improvement, but heterogeneity was high and most included studies were quasi-experimental [3].
A meta-analysis of digital communication education in medical students found no reliable advantage over traditional teaching and reported generally low-quality evidence [4]. A 2026 umbrella review across several undergraduate health professions reached a similarly cautious conclusion about virtual and immersive technologies: possible short-term benefits were reported, but all nine included systematic reviews were rated critically low quality and evidence for long-term transfer into clinical practice remains limited [5].
Overall, the evidence provides good confidence that communication can be deliberately taught, but less confidence that any one teaching technology or simulation format is best. Overall Quality: ➕➕➕.
