The Effect of a Structured, Home-based Interview With a Patient on First-year Medical Students' Patient-centredness.

Summary

Background

Doctors are regarded as professionals, and specific teaching on professional behaviour is considered important in many countries. For medical students, early patient contact experiences were found to be an important way of learning about professionalism, and learning activities promoting critical reflection were particularly effective. Medical students consider that patient-centredness is one of the most important aspects of medical professionalism, and the PPOS questionnaire has been used extensively in measuring the attitudes of medical students towards patient-centredness. The PPOS-D12 questionnaire is a validated German version of that questionnaire.

The study aim is to assess how a structured, in-depth, home-based interview with a patient with a chronic illness affects first-year medical students' patient-centredness.

Methods

In this randomised controlled trial, medical students who are in the first year of their studies at the University of Bern will be randomised to either seeing a patient with a chronic illness for a structured, in-depth interview in their own home (the intervention), or to reading an educational document that gives information about consultation skills (the sham comparator).

Students will complete the PPOS-D12 survey before and after the interventions, so that changes in their scores can be calculated, and the mean scores of the two groups compared. Secondary outcomes will be the effect of students' gender and prior exposure to chronic illness in the participant or her/his close relatives and friends on their PPOS-D12 scores. A nested study will measure the strength of association between the GP teachers' own levels of patient/doctor-centredness and changes in their students' levels over the year.

Discussion

This research will consider the effect of an in-depth, structured interview with a patient with a chronic illness on changes in first-year medical students' levels of patient-centredness. There is existing evidence that medical students' levels of patient-centredness reduce over their student years, and this study will contribute to an understanding of how this reduction can be minimised or reversed.

Conditions

• Educational Techniques

Interventions

OTHER

Intervention

The intervention will be a structured in-depth interview with a patient with a chronic illness that has been chosen by the student's allocated GP teacher. These chronic diseases are the four conditions at the top of a list of diseases with high disability-adjusted life years (DALY) scores in Switzerland: ischaemic heart disease, low back pain, major depressive disorder and COPD. GP teachers and students will be told that the students' intervention interviews need to be unaccompanied and at patients' own homes. The interview will be followed by a structured interview with the practice nurse and then a structured debriefing interview with the GP teacher.

OTHER

Sham comparator

In the sham comparator, the student's allocated GP teacher will be give the student time to read a document that gives information about consultation skills, and asks questions that the student will need to discuss with the GP teacher. The document is designed to have real educational value, and to complement BIHAM's department-based consultation skills teaching.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• University of Bern

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Michael F Harris, MB BS MMEd · Employee

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

OTHER

Masking

SINGLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2018-09-28

Primary Completion

2019-06-20

Completion

2019-06-20

Countries

• Switzerland

Study Locations