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Published on: February 16, 2011
Assessing Family Medicine Residents' Communication Skills From the Patient's Perspective: Evaluating the
Background:
The Communication Assessment Tool (CAT), a paper-based patient survey, is 1 method to assess residents' interpersonal and communication skills. To further enhance the interpretation of the CAT, benchmark data are needed.
Objective:
We sought to expand upon initial benchmarking data for the use of the CAT as an evaluation tool in family medicine residency programs.
Methods:
Data were collected on 120 residents from 7 family medicine residency programs. Following an appointment with a resident, 1703 patients completed the CAT.
Results:
The overall mean percentage of items rated as excellent was 73%. Significant differences were found in the overall percentage of items rated as "excellent" based on location of training (78% US graduate versus 71% international medical graduate) and native language of the resident (76% English speaking versus 69% non-English speaking). There were no significant differences found in the overall percentage of items rated as excellent based on the year of training or sex of the residents.
Conclusions:
These benchmarking data allow family medicine residency programs to compare the performance of their residents with other programs. The CAT can be used as an evaluation and a learning tool in family medicine and may be applicable to other specialties.
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