An analysis of listening skills of healthcare students in Nigeria.

BACKGROUND Listening is a primary communication skill essential for human learning and reported to be positively correlated with school achievement. It enables the healthcare professional to explore fully the ideas and concerns of the patient during a healthcare encounter. It is especially needed by healthcare students and professionals in light of the study showing that the typical physician will interrupt a patient after about 18-23 seconds. OBJECTIVE The objective of this study was to measure the listening skills of the undergraduate health sciences students in a Nigerian setting and to attempt to explain different levels of individual listening skills. METHODS Selected undergraduate students in medicine, dentistry, nursing and physiotherapy who volunteered to complete a self-administered questionnaire were studied. The questionnaire contained seventeen items, ranked on a 5-point Likert scale on the various habits people adopt when listening to others and the students' three most recent academic test scores. RESULTS The mean (SD) score for the seventeen items was 2.72 (1.14) out of 5. Seven items had mean scores greater than 3.00, eight items had mean scores between 2.00 and 3.00, and two items had mean less than 2.00. The students had a minimum score of 27 and a maximum score of 67 compared with a possible 17 and 85. The mean (SD) score for the listening scale by the students was 46.87 (7.33). Eighty percent of the respondents had good listening skills. There were no statistically significant associations between the listening skills scores of the students and several possible explanatory variables - age, gender, course being studied and test scores. CONCLUSION The findings indicate that neither males nor females are the better listeners. It showed impressively high levels of listening skills among the respondents. There was the absence of explanatory variables which were significant in explaining differences between individual listening skill scores.