Communication Skills for Doctors: A Guide for Effective Communication with Patients and Families - Tapa blanda

Although this book is not written primarily for anaesthetic trainees, it is very readable and includes much of relevance to our specialty. I would recommend this book to both trainees who wish to improve their communication skills and to trainers who wish to teach on this subject.
Anaesthesia Points West

Chapters range from breaking bad news to interviewing potentially suicidal patients and withdrawn patients, and handling difficult situations such as anixiety, depression and hopelessness. Each chapter states the problem succinctly and describes guidelines for how it should, or sometimes must, be explored.
Family Practice

Aimed at senior medical students and doctors in training, the key objective of this book is to help them become more competent in dealing with common areas of communication which many find particuarly difficult. The author covers the main areas where communication takes place and the difficult scenarios students/doctors are likely to encounter, providing practical (and alternative) guidelines to cover a broad range of situations.
Beginning with a review of basic communication skills, the text includes doctor/patient interchanges taken from the author's own work experience. These feature both good and bad examples of real communication and include alternative ways of handling difficult situations. Research is cited where appropriate, drawing on the body of research in medical communication. Each chapter ends with a brief summary and suggests questions for use in classrooms or self-study.