Teaching Advanced Interviewing Skills to Residents: A Curriculum for Institutions with Limited Resources

Residency program directors currently face new requirements from the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), including the mandate to demonstrate their residents' proficiency in communication skills. Such skills can be improved through an educational intervention, but few residencies specifically offer formal instruction in communication. Furthermore, the only formal instruction in communication skills described thus far for internal medicine residents requires hundreds of hours per month of faculty and resident time. This paper describes a time-efficient seminar series in communication skills for first-year internal medicine residents, which has been received well by faculty and learners as evidenced by post-seminar surveys and focus groups.