Health minister Alexandru Rafila believes that nurses and even doctors could take communication courses necessary for interaction with patients and relatives.

„These communication courses (…) should be part of the training curriculum for nurses and doctors. I think that the optional part is not very tempting because we also have this problem – anything provisional tends to become definitive and a provisional status is not a good thing. For 22 years we have been struggling with health education in schools, I don’t think we have to wait another 22 years to introduce communication as a subject. People, when they are ill, or the families of children when they are ill, need not only encouragement, they need an explanation, they need someone to communicate with and to understand their anxieties and they need encouragement and empathy. These things you can have natively, but they have to be acquired in an institutional setting that the school offers, whether we’re talking about nursing and midwifery schools or medical schools and maybe we can even think about communication,” Rafila said.

The Health minister attended the conference on „The role of the family in paediatric patient care” in Parliament on Tuesday.

In his opinion, the concept that the family participates in the care of children should be developed.

AGERPRES