Teaching of competence "patient-centred approach": French general practice departments' tools

Context. A competent general practitioner is often described as having biomedical and relational skills. In France, the patient-centered approach of communications skills is taught during the general practitioner course. This is done by the "department of general practice" (DMG). Aim.: To enhance this sharing by inventorying the tools and speakers found in the teaching of communical skills in the French general practice course. Method. Datas were collected between the 15th of December 2015 and the 9th of April 2016. A self-administrated survey was sent to the 36 French DMG. The survey was offered in three ways. Seven requests were made afterwards. Datas were collected and treated declaratively with Excel (R). Results. Twenty-seven DMG gave an answer. Seven gave two answers. Twenty-six tools were reported. Nine of them were reported by only one DMG. Some were described precisely and appeared pioneering (observational internship in facilities taking care of psychological suffering people, musical contents, roleplaying with an actor, movies.). Eleven kinds of speakers were reported [actors, psychiatrists, nurses, psychologists (Balint), physiotherapists, sociologists]. Conclusion. The inventorying was difficult to achieve. Respondents from the same DMG gave discordant answers. It shows how difficult it is to think about the tools and the method. The pedagogic changes brought by the competence approach are gradually settling in. By instance, the use of prototypical clinical cases decreases while the narration of authentic clinical situations increases.