Communication Laboratory (KomLab)

Background

Communication skills are essential for medical doctors. Better communication skills relates to less misdiagnosis, better decided treatment and less medical misconduct. During the recent few decades, utilizing Programs for Simulated Patients in communication skills training for medical students has become very popular in North American medical schools. With a few exceptions, European medical school use simulated patients less frequently.

Pedagogical framework

Regarding the medical students at Bergen Medical School as adult people, we base the training in our KomLab on the following adult pedagogical principles:

• All cards on the table. All aspects of the communication laboratory and expectations to the students are carefully lined out.

• Communication skills are best trained when the medical subject is known. The students get well ahead specifically tailored information on the 'disease' of the simulated patient.

• Specific learning goals are given ahead, and feed-back tailored accordingly.

• Feed-back is given immediately after exposition, by the specially trained simulated patients.

We base our pedagogical framework on how similar skills training laboratories are structured. We are specially inspired by the Standardized Patient Programs at the University of Michigan and at the University of Toronto.

The training session

Each training session consists of an individual meeting between the medical student and simulated patient. The theme of the 3rd year training is history gathering in a income interview at the local hospital. The simulated patient 'has' gall bladder stones. The learning goals encompass 22 necessary simple and complex skills by history gathering.

The training session starts with a 20 minutes medical interview. Then student and simulated patient score the student's performance on a check-list corresponding in a 1:1 relation to the learning goals. Based on this checklist, the simulant invites the student to a conversation on the student's strong sides, and possible aspects of behavior to work on. The whole session takes less than one hour.

Each session is video recorded, and the the video is accessible for the student at their personal site at the university's internal web. We are currently working at the pedagogy for this part of the training.

Evaluation

Students evaluate highly this possibility for training, and we are working on data from an RTC on learning outcome.

Supported by the Faculty of medicine and dentistry, we are now looking for possible extensions at levels to other year levels of medical students, as well as extensions to other studies and to the private marked.