BackgroundThere is a relative lack of current research on the effects of specific communication training offered at the beginning of the medical degree program. The newly developed communication training "Basics and Practice in Communication Skills" was pilot tested in 2008 and expanded in the following year at the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany. The goal was to promote and improve the communicative skills of participants and show the usefulness of an early offered intervention on patient-physician communication within the medical curriculum.MethodsThe students participating in the project and a comparison group of students from the standard degree program were surveyed at the beginning and end of the courses. The survey consisted of a self-assessment of their skills as well as a standardised expert rating and an evaluation of the modules by means of a questionnaire.ResultsStudents who attended the communication skills course exhibited a considerable increase of communication skills in this newly developed training. It was also observed that students in the intervention group had a greater degree of self-assessed competence following training than the medical students in the comparison group. This finding is also reflected in the results from a standardised objective measure.ConclusionsThe empirical results of the study showed that the training enabled students to acquire specialised competence in communication through the course of a newly developed training program. These findings will be used to establish new communication training at the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf.

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The aim of our study was to develop a graphical tool that can be used in addition to standard statistical criteria to support decisions on the number of classes in explorative categorical latent variable modeling for rehabilitation research. Data from two rehabilitation research projects were used. In the first study, a latent profile analysis was carried out in patients with cancer receiving an inpatient rehabilitation program to identify prototypical combinations of treatment elements. In the second study, growth mixture modeling was used to identify latent trajectory classes based on weekly symptom severity measurements during inpatient treatment of patients with mental disorders. A graphical tool, the Class Evolution Tree, was developed, and its central components were described. The Class Evolution Tree can be used in addition to statistical criteria to systematically address the issue of number of classes in explorative categorical latent variable modeling.

Schl ü sselw ö rter • ▶ Rehabilitation • ▶ Prostatakrebs • ▶ rehabilitative Interventionen • ▶ systematische Literaturanalyse • ▶ Review Abstract & Purpose: A systematic literature analysis of the eff ectiveness of specifi c rehabilitation-related interventions for prostate cancer patients has not been conducted so far. Materials and Methods: Established literature databases (Medline, Psyndex, PsychINFO, EBMR)as well as reference lists, meta-analyses, and literature reviews were systematically searched for studies on the eff ectiveness of rehabilitation interventions for prostate cancer patients. Furthermore, guidelines for the treatment of prostate cancer were browsed for rehabilitation related content. Studies on both out-patient and in-patient interventions were included, whereas diagnostic studies as well as medical and nursing procedures and drug trials were excluded from the analysis. Out of a total of 1 627 626 articles, 65 articles were eventually included in the analysis and evaluated according to the Oxford Levels of Evidence. Results: Studies on the eff ectiveness of interventions for prostate cancer patients were identifi ed in the following rehabilitation-related areas: psychosocial interventions, urinary incontinence treatment, massage, sport therapy, relaxation techniques, lymph drainage, artistic therapies and interdisciplinary rehabilitation programmes. However, with regard to health education courses, balneotherapy, occupational therapy and social work, no studies including prostate cancer patients could be identifi ed. For the majority of rehabilitation-related interventions, the evidence regarding their eff ectiveness was not suffi cient or contradictory. Discussion and Conclusions: The eff ectiveness of interventions carried out in the rehabilita tion of prostate cancer patients was rarely examined so far. The systematic literature analysis shows, that up to now suffi cient evidence was established for only few of these interventions.

The studies included heterogeneous analyses, treatments, and patients. Despite their sufficient methodical quality, these results are only tentative.