Using Bedside Rounds to Teach Communication Skills in the Internal Medicine Clerkship

Physicians' communication skills, which are linked to important patient outcomes, are rarely explicitly taught during the clinical years of medical school. This paper describes the development, implementation, and evaluation of a communication skills curriculum during the third-year Internal Medicine Clerkship.

In four two-hour structured bedside rounds with trained Internal Medicine faculty facilitators, students learned core communication skills in the context of common challenging clinical situations. In an end-of-clerkship survey students evaluated the curriculum's educational effectiveness.

Over the course of a year, 160 third-year students and 15 faculty participated. Of the 75/160 (47%) of students who completed the post-clerkship survey, almost all reported improvement in their communication skills and their ability to deal with specific communication challenges.

The curriculum appears to be a successful way to reinforce core communication skills and practice common challenging situations students encounter during the Internal Medicine Clerkship.