Responding to patients' emotions: Important for standardized patient satisfaction

Background and Objectives: Several experts have emphasized the need to resp ond to a patient's emotions as an essential component of effective medical interviewing. This study examined the relationship of faculty observers' sc ores of students' performance in standardized patient (SP) interviewing sta tions in a family medicine clerkship objective structured clinical examinat ion (OSCE) with SP satisfaction measures. Methods: The faculty observers sc ored students in the following performance domains: 1) interviewing skills, 2) negotiating the diagnosis or plan, 3) gathering case-specific content i nformation, 4) responding to the patient's emotions, and 5) student's overa ll performance. Pearson Product-Moment correlations were calculated for eac h of these domains and the Standardized Patient Satisfaction Questionnaire (SPSQ) scores. Results: There were moderate correlations between the SPSQ s core and the overall OSCE score (.45) and the response to patient's emotion s skill score (.36). The faculty observer's response to patient's emotion s core correlated highly with the student's overall OSCE score (.75). Conclus ions: A student's ability to respond to the patient's emotions appears to b e an important skill for successful medical interviewing from both the facu lty observer's perspective an the SP's perspective. Results also demonstrat e the the SP's perspective is similar, but not identical, to the faculty ob server's perspective, suggesting that SPs have an important evaluative role in student assessment.