Assessing Interpersonal and Communication Skills in Emergency Medicine

Abstract

Interpersonal and communication skills (ICS) are a key component of several competency-based schemata and key competency in the set of six Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) core competencies. With the shift toward a competency-based educational framework, the importance of robust learner assessment becomes paramount. The journal Academic Emergency Medicine (AEM) hosted a consensus conference to discuss education research in emergency medicine (EM). This article summarizes the initial preparatory research that was conducted to brief consensus conference attendees and reports the results of the consensus conference breakout session as it pertains to ICS assessment of learners. The goals of this consensus conference session were to twofold: 1) to determine the state of assessment of observable learner performance and 2) to determine a research agenda within the ICS field for medical educators. The working group identified six key recommendations for medical educators and researchers.

Assessing Team Leadership in Emergency Medicine: The Milestones and Beyond

“…While communication skills are an important focus in EM, they are not the only skills critical to effective team leadership. 41 As noted earlier, transition processes (eg, evaluation and planning) and action processes (eg, patient and system monitoring) are critical to team effectiveness. 16,18 Only 1 of the milestones (level 4.1 ''recommends changes in team performance as necessary for optimal efficiency'') describes a team leadership behavior beyond communication skills; in this case, the ''action process'' of monitoring team progress toward a goal.…”

“…22 Building on the original ACGME competencies, the milestones provide specialty-specific detail to each core competency. [39][40][41][42][43][44] Each competency is divided into 1 or more subcompetencies. For example, the interpersonal and communication skills competency has 2 subcompetencies: (1) patientcentered communication, and (2) team management.…”

The writer’s guide to education scholarship in emergency medicine: Education innovations (part 3)

“…The Google Scholar search yielded 2,130,000 results. As presented in the search strategy by Chan et al, 15 the abstracts for the top 500 search results were reviewed. Eight abstracts were deemed relevant.…”

A writer’s guide to education scholarship: Qualitative education scholarship (part 2)

“…21 In this instance, we used it to supplement our other database searches. 22,23 The keywords medical education, emergency medicine, and qualitative were used. We did not specify a time period for publications and accessed all literature available in the MEDLINE and ERIC databases from their beginning date.…”