Developing New Dental Communication Skills Assessment Tools by Including Patients and Other Stakeholders

Abstract

Effectively using patients as teachers to provide authentic feedback is an underused strategy in dental education, but it has potential for integrating the teaching of therapeutic communication skills within the dental clinic setting. This study focuses on the absence of patient input into the design of instruments used to assess students' clinical communication skills and demonstrates how a holistic approach, with input from key stakeholders including patients, was used to produce two such instruments. The development of complementary communication assessment instruments, one for patient use and one for student use, took place in three phases. In Phase I the authors reviewed a sample of existing patient satisfaction surveys; in Phase II they captured input from stakeholders; and Phase III resulted in the generation of the patient communication assessment instrument and the student communication self-assessment instrument. This article highlights communication skill issues relevant to the education of oral health professionals and describes the rationale and process for the development of the first iteration of the patient assessment and student self-assessment clinical communication instruments. Ms. Wener is Clinical Communications Skills Coordinator,Journal of Dental Education ■ Volume 75, Number 12 poration of self-awareness and reflection into clinical practice 26 and is the crux of the educational approach described in this article.The interprofessional educational research team at the University of Manitoba Faculty of Dentistry that developed this approach consisted of an educational psychologist, a dental hygienist educator, and a dental educator. They identified five educational research goals that provided the impetus and guidance for this project: 1. To provide a strategy for developing competence in communication for dental and dental hygiene students to become skilled, caring, and collaborative communicators using patients as teachers, self-assessment, and reflection. 2. To meaningfully and cost-effectively integrate classroom teaching into clinical care. 3. To reinforce students' communication strengths and to identify and address areas in the student's communication that require improvement. 4. To inform development of the dental and dental hygiene communication skills curricula at the University of Manitoba by identifying key communication skills as well as identifying any curricular gaps that need to be addressed. 5. To provide the Faculty of Dentistry with feedback from patients and students about the overall clinical experience.To address these goals, two communication skills instruments were developed: one for patients to assess their dental and dental hygiene student clinicians' communication, referred to as the Patient Communication Assessment Instrument (PCAI); and one for student clinicians to self-assess their communication with their patients, referred to as the Student Communication Assessment Instrument (SCAI). To promote learning, the PCAI and SCAI results were integrated into a combin...

Evaluation of Patient-Centered Communication in the Dental Practice of Kazakhstan

“…Effective verbal communication is necessary for successful dental treatment. According to Wener et al, oral health providers have to be good communicators able to meet the patients' expectations [12]. The providers should show empathy and patients should feel valued.…”

“…During the most important third and fourth years, the students do not have communication classes, otherwise, this class receives relatively low priority. There are some other barriers such as inadequately trained clinical faculty, the cost of resources and lack of the ability to balance the time spent on communicating and providing medical care [12][13][14][15][16]. It was revealed that the progress of students through their postgraduate education makes them patient-centered [14].…”

“…Further education makes dental graduates more aware of patient-oriented care. Testing extensive training programs to teach patient-centered communication skills has demonstrated progress in patient satisfaction [12].…”

Bedömning av professionella samtal : en studie av undervisning och bedömning av tandläkarstudenters patientsamtal

“…Five instruments for assessing more general communication competence developed and/or evaluated in dentistry and dental education were therefore used as a starting point, and relevant items on information-sharing and relationship-building were identified. 19,[35][36][37][38] As none of these items focused directly on shared decisions, items from relevant instruments in the area of medicine were also included, in order to obtain a comprehensive list of items relevant for SDM.…”

“…All the instruments consulted used ordinal scales ranging from two to seven levels. 19,[35][36][37][38] The scales either focused on perceived quality or appearance. In this study, the author decided to use a scale with three levels with response options from inadequate to good.…”