A COMMUNICATION-SKILLS COURSE FOR PRECLINICAL STUDENTS - EVALUATION OF GENERAL-PRACTICE BASED TEACHING USING GROUP-METHODS

Teaching preclinical medical students about doctor-patient communicati on gives them an opportunity to develop their interviewing skills prio r to their having to elicit lists of symptoms in their clinical years. General practitioners should be among the more efficient interviewers in clinical medicine and therefore able to make important contributio ns to the teaching of interviewing skills. This paper describes the ai ms, objectives and methods of the preclinical communications skills co urse at St George's Hospital Medical School. The contribution of the D ivision of General Practice and Primary Care to the teaching of interv iewing skills in the preclinical course has been evaluated using rapid group methods. Students were asked to identify examples of specific i nterviewing behaviours in videotaped general practice consultations, a nd to judge whether the behaviours were helpful or unhelpful in elicit ing relevant information from the patient. Students who had been given experience in interviewing patients in small groups led by general pr actitioners identified significantly more helpful and unhelpful interv iewing behaviours in the taped consultations than students who had not received the small-group teaching. Students rated the teaching as rel evant and effective in terms of giving insights into the interviewing skills they needed to develop. Group methods of evaluation such as the se might prove useful to other medical schools with class sizes of 150 students or more.