Evaluation of Interprofessional Team Disclosure of a Medical Error to a Simulated Patient

Objective. To evaluate the impact of an Interprofessional Communication Skills Workshop on pharmacy student confidence and proficiency in disclosing medical errors to patients. Pharmacy student behavior was also compared to that of other health professions' students on the team. Design. Students from up to four different health professions participated in a simulation as part of an interprofessional team. Teams were evaluated with a validated rubric postsimulation on how well they handled the disclosure of an error to the patient. Individually, each student provided anonymous feedback and self-reflected on their abilities via a Likert-scale evaluation tool. A comparison of pharmacy students who completed the workshop (active group) vs all others who did not (control group) was completed and analyzed. Assessment. The majority of students felt they had adequate training related to communication issues that cause medication errors. However, fewer students believed that they knew how to report such an error to a patient or within a health system. Pharmacy students who completed the workshop were significantly more comfortable explicitly stating the error disclosure to a patient and/or caregiver and were more likely to apologize and respond to questions forthrightly (p<0.05). Conclusions. This data affirms the need to devote more time to training students on communicating with patients about the occurrence of medical errors and how to report these errors. Educators should be encouraged to incorporate such training within interprofessional education curricula.