Interpersonal skills training: evaluation in an internal medicine residency

To determine the effectiveness of teaching interpersonal skills in a general internal medicine residency, a program was developed utilizing videotape feedback of house-staff/patient interactions, a modification of Interpersonal Process Recall (IPR). Fifty-one randomly selected house officers at different levels of training were included in a controlled, pretest-posttest study design. The major pre-post measures were three independent ratings of videotapes of actual first-visit interviews between resident and patient. House officers in the experimental group significantly increased the proportion of each interview devoted to psychosocial issues compared with controls, although the interviews remained predominantly medical; increased the use of effective responses; and improved their level of empathy with patients. Personality and attitude measures were found not to correlate with observed interpersonal skills on pretest or posttest videotapes. House officers rated the training program as being interesting, valuable, relevant, and nonthreatening. The data suggest that interpersonal skills can be effectively taught to internal medicine residents utilizing a videotape feedback training program.