Background:

communication is a component of health systems, essential in care, teaching, management and health promotion and disease prevention actions for the fulfillment of the educational mission of promoting quality of life in human beings.

Objective:

to assess the perception of first-year medical students about their communication skills.

Methods:

a cross-sectional descriptive study was developed at the "Chiqui Gómez Lubián" University Polyclinic in the period from March to July 2020. It included 15 students from the Villa Clara Faculty of Medicine of the 1st year of the degree. For this, theoretical methods were used: analysis-synthesis, induction-deduction and historical-logical; empirical: survey in the form of interview with students and key informants.

Results:

most of the students assessed their communication skills as moderately adequate, which coincides with the criteria of the key informants who corroborated the inadequacies perceived by the students.

Conclusions:

taking into account the results obtained, it is necessary to intend the communicative approach in the curricular and extracurricular activities to solve the deficiencies perceived by the students regarding their communication skills.

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