Authoring of Patient Education Materials by Medical Students: an Activity Designed to Demonstrate Communication to the Lay Public

Abstract

As part of their training, physicians develop excellent patient communication skills. However, with a constellation of responsibilities that impinge on a physician’s time, it is not always possible to convey appropriate amounts of information such that patients can use this to enhance their health. Physicians also may not select the educational resources that best fit each patient’s needs, based on educational level of the patient. At The Commonwealth Medical College, one strategy we have utilized to demonstrate to students how to deliver an understandable diagnosis, instructions for treatment, or other medical information, was having our first year medical students write pamphlets on a disease covered in one of our small group cases for problem-based learning (PBL). The goal of the pamphlet was to explain a particular disease in layman’s terms, and to present information that patients would need in order to deal with a particular disease. Students were asked to write pamphlets during the first basic science course they encountered, the Cellular and Molecular Basis of Life. The problem-based learning case was on Bloom’s Syndrome, a genetic disease discussed in this course. Different groups approached the project in different ways, but all had a great deal of creativity in their final product. We include examples of these brochures to demonstrate the effectiveness of this exercise. These brochures were part of the narrative evaluation of our students, as the course was pass/fail. Students were given verbal feedback by their PBL facilitator as well. We present three examples of these pamphlets, and include an evaluation of these pamphlets by the faculty not shared with the students in which we used the Suitability Assessment of Materials (SAM) tool to assess how well the students had met the goal of developing a useful tool for patient education and an on-line readability tool that assesses the readability of the patient education materials by several readability assays.