COMPONENTS of ETSU’s CORE COMMUNICATIONS

SKILLS STANDARDIZED PATIENT SCENARIOS

The standardized patient scenarios in this collection are all designed with a common vision, to provide opportunities to observe those core communication skills believed to be central to a patient-centered medical interview, namely:

· Building a personal yet professional rapport with the patient.

· Using nondirected facilitation to encourage the patient to further disclose important issues, concerns, and all agenda items.

· Effective medical data collection and organization (open to closed-ended, use of summary).

· Using active listening to understand the meaning behind patients’ expressions and behavior, which imply but do not explicitly state issues and concerns.

· Addressing feelings related to the reason for the visit.

· Using several skills to reach common ground when the patient and clinician differ about key elements of the diagnostic or therapeutic plan.

Cases have all been field tested with interviewers at a student and/or resident and/or practicing clinician level. In addition to materials for training standardized patients in the role, the cases include the following features and materials:

· Faculty guide, providing input from faculty who have taught with the cases and who are familiar with the most frequent instructional issues which surface in using them.

· Many include checklists for assessing medical information gathering and communication skills use. These can be used when the scenarios are used for formal assessment of communications and medical interviewing (for example OSCE exams).

· Many have standardized patient training tapes available, which depict the standardized patient performance with several different styles of medical interviewing.

· Learner handouts available on each of the core skills and on many of the special situations, for example, interviewing for substance abuse, domestic violence, end of life issues, etc.

· Accompanying documentation contains rating forms for use by standardized patients, specifically designed to assess core patient-centered communication skills (not just rapport and professionalism).

NOTE: In order to maintain formatting and readability, diskette copies of scenarios are distributed as PDF files, which can be opened, viewed, and printed exactly as they appear using Adobeâ Acrobatâ Reader. If you do not have Adobe Acrobat Reader already installed on your computer, you can download it free from the Adobe site at http://www.adobe.com/prodindex/acrobat/readstep.html. If you wish to modify the documents to suit your institutional environment, you are licensed to do so (but please continue to give credit to ETSU). To modify, you will need to first copy the text into the word processing software of your choice (instructions included).