Development and evaluation of a risk communication curriculum for medical students

Abstract

Objective: To develop, pilot, and evaluate a curriculum for teaching clinical risk communication skills to medical students.

Methods: A new experience-based curriculum, "Risk Talk," was developed and piloted over a 1-year period among students at Tufts University School of Medicine. An experimental study of 2nd-year students exposed vs. unexposed to the curriculum was conducted to evaluate the curriculum's efficacy. Primary outcome measures were students' objective (observed) and subjective (self-reported) risk communication competence; the latter was assessed using an Observed Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) employing new measures.

Results: Twenty-eight 2nd-year students completed the curriculum, and exhibited significantly greater (p<.001) objective and subjective risk communication competence than a convenience sample of 24 unexposed students. New observational measures of objective competence in risk communication showed promising evidence of reliability and validity. The curriculum was resource-intensive.

Conclusion: The new experience-based clinical risk communication curriculum was efficacious, although resource-intensive. More work is needed to develop the feasibility of curriculum delivery, and to improve the measurement of competence in clinical risk communication.

Practice implications: Risk communication is an important advanced communication skill, and the Risk Talk curriculum provides a model educational intervention and new assessment tools to guide future efforts to teach and evaluate this skill.

Keywords: Communication skills; Medical education; Risk communication.