Assessing Students' Communication and Interpersonal Skills Across Evaluation Settings

摘要

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Medical students' interpersonal and communication skills are a fundamentaldimension of their clinical competence and will be measured on the anticipated US MedicalLicensure Examination (USMLE) standardized patient (SP) exam. We compared students' performanceon measures of SP satisfaction on a third-year family medicine Objective Structured Clinical Examination(OSCE) with measures of SP satisfaction on a fourth-year Clinical Practice Examination (CPX).METHODS: A total of 127 students completed both the clerkship OSCE and a CPX. The CPX was a pilotof the National Board of Medical Examiners Standardized Patient Exam. To assess students’ interpersonalskills, both exams used modified versions of the American Board of Internal Medicine PatientSatisfaction Questionnaire. Students’ scores were standardized, and correlations were calculated. Alogistic regression model examined the ability of the OSCE to predict poor performance on the CPX.RESULTS: The correlation between the OSCE and CPX patient satisfaction scores was .08. There was nosignificant predictive ability of the OSCE for poor performance on the CPX. CONCLUSIONS: Our studycalls into question the ability of a routine end-of-clerkship OSCE to identify students’ interpersonalskills abilities on fourth-year clinical performance exams and potentially that component of the anticipatedUSMLE SP exam.