Enhancing medical students' communication skills: development and evaluation of an undergraduate training program
Authors
Hausberg, Maria C.herert, Anika
Kroger, Corinna
Bullinger, Monika
Rose, Matthias S. F.
Andreas, Sylke
UMass Chan Affiliations
Department of Quantitative Health SciencesDocument Type
Journal ArticlePublication Date
2012-03-24Keywords
Adult*Communication
*Curriculum
Data Collection
Education, Medical, Undergraduate
Female
Germany
Humans
Male
*Professional Competence
*Program Development
*Students, Medical
Young Adult
Medical Education
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
BACKGROUND: There is a relative lack of current research on the effects of specific communication training offered at the beginning of the medical degree program. The newly developed communication training "Basics and Practice in Communication Skills" was pilot tested in 2008 and expanded in the following year at the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany. The goal was to promote and improve the communicative skills of participants and show the usefulness of an early offered intervention on patient-physician communication within the medical curriculum. METHODS: The students participating in the project and a comparison group of students from the standard degree program were surveyed at the beginning and end of the courses. The survey consisted of a self-assessment of their skills as well as a standardised expert rating and an evaluation of the modules by means of a questionnaire. RESULTS: Students who attended the communication skills course exhibited a considerable increase of communication skills in this newly developed training. It was also observed that students in the intervention group had a greater degree of self-assessed competence following training than the medical students in the comparison group. This finding is also reflected in the results from a standardised objective measure. CONCLUSIONS: The empirical results of the study showed that the training enabled students to acquire specialised competence in communication through the course of a newly developed training program. These findings will be used to establish new communication training at the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf.Source
BMC Med Educ. 2012 Mar 24;12:16. Link to article on publisher's siteDOI
10.1186/1472-6920-12-16Permanent Link to this Item
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14038/46593PubMed ID
22443807Related Resources
Link to Article in PubMedRights
© 2012 Hausberg et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1186/1472-6920-12-16