Effects of Simulated Patient Practice on attitudes towards communication skills training of medical students: An intervention study

Abstract

Communication is a basic clinical skill that can be learned, taught, and evaluated. This study aimed to assess the attitudes of medical faculty sophomore students toward the communication skills training module consists theory courses and simulated patient interviews. This study was planned in a before-and-after intervention study and was carried out with 257 second-year medical students. The Communication Skills Attitude Scale (CSAS) was used for data collection. The scale was administered to the participants before the training (1), after the training (2), and after the simulated patient interviews (3). Positive attitude scores (PAS 1,2,3), and negative attitude scores (NAS 1,2,3) were evaluated. The mean age of the students was 20.13±2.13 years, and 133 (51.8%) were female. PAS 1 and PAS 3 scores were 55.38±6.58 and 58.05±7.39, respectively, while NAS 1 and 3 scores were 30.25±4.49 and 28.88±4.96, respectively. PAS 3 was considerably higher than PAS 1 and 2 scores (p=.03), at the same time NAS 3 was significantly lower than NAS 1 and 2 scores (p=.00). There was no difference between the positive and negative attitudes of females and males before the training (p>.05). However, after the training, female's positive scores significantly increased compared to men (p=.03), and their negative scores decreased (p=.01).