Grant to research communication training
A research proposal led by Associate Professor Pam Snow has won a faculty learning and teaching research grant of $17,000 to investigate a new approach to communication skills training for medical students.
Interviewing patients is an integral component of all health professions’ day-to-day clinical work and underpins how effectively practitioners gather diagnostic information and explain management plans. Communication issues are a major concern for regulatory bodies. A recent Australian report of complaints against medical practitioners revealed that nearly a quarter of concerns related to communication issues.
Communication skills training is integrated in the medical curriculum of many universities and generally focuses on clinician behaviours and effective transfer of information. Best practice guidelines around questioning and interviewing technique, however, remain unexplored. Evidence from a different discipline – training investigative interviewers – suggests that learners should be provided with explicit instruction about what to say in key situations. As far as possible they should not be allowed to “flounder” and rehears errors. No studies exist which have applied the (forensic) investigative interviewing evidence to the training of clinicians.
The project will adapt an existing method of clinical interviewing (the Calgary-Cambridge teaching method) then compare and contrast commonly-used interviewing training with the adapted model. The research will aid preparation for a collaborative research project between Monash and Deakin Universities. This larger project will be multi-disciplinary and multi-site with links to interviewing methods in medicine, nursing, allied health and forensic (child protection investigative interviewing) work.