Using role-plays to teach palliative medicine

Teaching of communication skills in Palliative Medicine can be achieved using a three hour exercise involving role-plays, a time of feedback and discussion, a teaching video and a reading list. Using this teaching method self-ratings of perceived skills recorded on a questionnaire before and four weeks after the exercises showed a significant increase in both undergraduates and postgraduates. The validity of these self-ratings as a tool to measure communication skills was assessed by correlating the self-ratings with the ratings given by the participant and the observers after the clinical scenarios from the questionnaire were simulated in role-plays.