ASSESSING SURGICAL RESIDENTS AND MEDICAL-STUDENTS INTERPERSONAL SKILLS

Effective physician-patient interaction is an important part of surgic al practice. This study had three goals: (1) to measure the interperso nal skills (IS) of surgical students and residents in structured clini c-al settings and to determine the reliability of such measurements; ( 2) to determine the relationship of IS to clinical performance; and (3 ) to determine the impact of level of training on IS. Twenty third-yea r medical students and 30 junior-level interns (23 PGY-1s, 7 PGY-2s) i nteracted with nine actual or simulated patients as part of an objecti ve structured clinical examination. Using a global rating scale, facul ty graded both the IS and the organizational skills of the candidates. A two-way analysis of variance indicated significant differences amon g the three groups of trainees (P = 0.0002) and among the IS scores fo r each of the nine patient problems (P < 0.0001). Both the PGY-2s and the medical students exhibited significantly better interpersonal skil ls than did the PGY-1s. The IS scores correlated significantly with th e data gathering scores, the data interpretation scores, and the organ izational scores. We conclude that faculty measurement of IS is modera tely reliable even when a simple global rating scale is used. Overall IS scores were rather poor, particularly in the PGY-1 group. IS were h ighly correlated with overall objective clinical performance. (C) 1994 Academic Press, Inc.