The article is devoted to the communicative competence of a doctor as a component of professional ethics. Knowledge of norms of the modern Russian literary language, compliance with these standards in the oral and written speech of a medical worker helps to establish contact between doctor and a patient. To identify the level of knowledge of Russian language norms, readiness for professional speech a scientific research was made, during which the most typical mistakes were revealed: orthoepic, morphological, lexical, stylistic. Following the norms of the language and ethics of communication contributes to the achievement of the main aim of a medical activity - recovering of a patient.