Can patient-physician interview skills be implemented with peer simulated patients?

ABSTRACT

Introduction

Patient-physician interviewing skills are crucial in health service delivery. It is necessary for effective care and treatment that the physician initiates the interview with the patient, takes anamnesis, collects the required information, and ends the consultation. Different methods are used to improve patient-physician interview skills before encountering actual patients. In the absence of simulated patients, peer simulation is an alternative method for carrying out the training. This study aims to show whether patient-physician interview skills training can be implemented using peer simulation in the absence of the simulated patient.

Methods

This is a descriptive quantitative study. This research was conducted in six stages: identification of the research problem and determination of the research question, development of data collection tools, planning, acting, evaluation, and monitoring. The data were collected via the patient-physician interview videos of the students. The research team performed descriptive analysis on quantitative data and thematic analysis on qualitative data.

Results

Fifty students participated in the study. When performing peer-assisted simulation applications in the absence of simulated patients, the success rate in patient-physician interviews and peer-simulated patient roles was over 88%. Although the students were less satisfied with playing the peer-simulated patient role, the satisfaction towards the application was between 77.33% and 98%.

Discussion and Conclusion

In patient-physician interviews, the peer-simulated patient method is an effective learning approach. There may be difficulties finding suitable simulated patients, training them, budgeting to cover the costs, planning, organizing the interviews, and solving potential issues during interviews. Our study offers an affordable solution for students to earn patient-physician interview skills in faculties facing difficulties with providing simulated patients for training.

KEYWORDS:

• Patient-physician interview skills
• peer-assisted learning
• simulation
• peer simulated patient
• peer simulation

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Associate Professor Zeynep Sofuoğlu, Associate Professor Nilüfer Demiral Yılmaz and Associate Professor Esra Meltem Koç for supporting us with expert opinions when creating the patient scenario.

We would like to thank the second-year students who participated in the study and conducted the patient physician interviews.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.