"Teach 1, do 1 ... better": Superior communication skills in senior medical students serving as standardized patient-examiners for their junior peers

Purpose. To see if senior medical students who had served as standardized p atients (SP) demonstrated improvement in their own interpersonal communicat ion skills. Method. From George Washington School of Medicine's class of 1996, 154 four th-year students took a clinical practice examination that used professiona l SPs. Within the preceding six months, 28 of these students had been SP-ex aminers in similar examinations for first- and second-year medical students . The professional SPs rated the fourth-year examinees using checklists tha t measured five dimensions of interpersonal communication skills. Four of t hese five dimensions were identical to those measured on the examinations f or which the fourth-year students had served as SPs. Hypothesizing that the SP-experienced seniors would outscore their inexperienced classmates on th ese four dimensions, but not on the fifth, the authors analyzed the fourth- year students' scores. P values were computed by the F test from a two-way analysis of variance. Results. As predicted, the group with prior SP experience significantly out scored their inexperienced colleagues in each of the four expected dimensio ns of interpersonal communication skills, with 1, values ranging from .000 to .023. The scare differential in these dimensions ranged from 3.8 to 11.8 percentage paints. As further predicted, there was no significant differen ce between the scores of the two groups on the fifth dimension. Conclusion. Compared with their inexperienced peers, senior medical student s with prior SP experience consistently demonstrated superior scores when t heir own communication skills were tested in a similar manner. The U.S. Med ical Licensing Examinations propose to incorporate SP clinical examinations ; in response, medical schools will use more SP examinations in their own c urricula. Such examinations are expensive when using professional standardi zed patients; the authors believe that an SP program using senior medical s tudents will prove an attractive alternative. Such programs may have the ad ded advantage of making better communicators of senior medical student teac hers as well as the students they teach.