A controlled experiment in teaching students to respond to patients' emotional concerns

Medical education faces increasing criticism because of the perception that it is difficult to produce physicians who are both technically competent and compassionate. One approach to addressing this problem is to train physicians to address the emotional concerns that patients experience as a result of their medical problems. Results of the authors' randomized, controlled experiment in training medical students to respond to patients' emotional concerns provide evidence of the efficacy and feasibility of such training. Only students who received small-group instruction in addition to large-group lectures exhibited statistically significant (p less than .001) improvement in their ability to respond to the emotional concerns of patients in hypothetical cases. The students who received only the lectures exhibited significant improvement (p less than .001) in their preference for responses that addressed patients' emotional concerns but not in their responses to written, hypothetical patient cases. Even though these students' preferences for responses to emotional concerns on the average did increase significantly, the preferences were significantly (p less than .001) less favorable than the preferences of the students who received small-group instruction. The small group instruction consisted of both interviews with elderly nursing home residents, who served as simulated patients, and structured practice and review sessions.