Teaching Family-Oriented Patient Care to Family Medicine Residents in Chile

Family-oriented patient care, an approach to involve the patient's family in clinical encounters, is essential to family medicine. The Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile offers a Family-Oriented Patient Care (FOPC) course within its family medicine residency program, aiming to enhance family involvement skills among residents. We present the course and report residents' self-efficacy, satisfaction, and competencies with family-oriented care after the course.

The FOPC course is an 8-week program using a flipped-classroom model with interactive discussions, role-play with simulated patients, and clinical activities. Evaluation methods include resident-reported self-efficacy, course relevance, satisfaction, clinical supervisors' assessments of family-oriented care competencies, and Observed Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) scores on simulated scenarios.

Residents reported high self-efficacy in family-oriented practices, with mean scores above 4.0 on a 5-point scale across various domains, including conducting family-oriented clinical visits and using family assessment tools. Course relevance and satisfaction received high ratings, with average scores of 4.7±0.7 on a 1-5 scale for relevance and 6.2±0.8 on a 1-7 scale for satisfaction. Clinical supervisors' evaluations indicated integration of family-oriented skills in patient care. However, OSCE scores suggested partial application of these skills in simulated clinical encounters.

After participating in the FOPC course, residents reported having confidence to apply family-oriented care skills in patient encounters, but OSCE ratings did not confirm clinical translation. Results highlight the need for continued reinforcement to enhance skill application in real clinical contexts, supporting the need for longitudinal training integration throughout residency.