Effectiveness of teaching interviewing and communication skills to physiotherapy students

Recognition of the importance of effective interviewing and communication skills, and the concomitant need to teach such skills to students in the helping professions are both relatively recent phenomena in rehabilitation medicine. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the impact of the model developed at the Institut de réadaptation de Montréal (IRM model) in the teaching of interviewing skills to physiotherapy students in the clinical setting. Twenty-six final-year physiotherapy students were assigned to two groups of 13 each, one of which received structured training in interviewing skills over a four-week period while the other received no specific instruction. Analyses of the appraisals of pre- and post-test student-patient interviews--the appraisals having been done not only by the students themselves, but by the patients and the independent raters--showed that scores on each evaluation improved significantly following the students' training program. The group receiving no training showed no significant improvement. The authors conclude that a short clinical training program using the IRM model can be effective in improving the interviewing skills of physiotherapy students.