Correlations between Communication Skills and Patient-Physician Interaction of Clinical Performance Examination

Abstract

Abstr act. The purpose of this study was to identify the correlations between medical students’ communication skills and patient-physician interaction (PPI) of clinical performance examination (CPX). The subjects were 36 fourth year medical students who had CPX after all clinical clerkships. After CPX, all subjects evaluated their communication skills by themselves using a questionnaire that consisted of 20 items in four categories. The assessment of PPI was performed during CPX by the standardized patients, trained to evaluate a medical communication. The communication skills were re-sorted according to the PPI questions and total scores were calculated. The correlations between the re-sorted scores of communication skills and score of PPI were analyzed. However, there were no significant correlations between them. This study showed that there were no correlations between communication skills and patient-physician interaction of CPX.