Engaging trainees by actively giving feedback will increase their receptiveness to peer' feedback and motivate behavior-changes in holistic care: a pilot study

Abstract

This article was migrated. The article was not marked as recommended. Background: Continuous trainings of holistic-care behaviors, including teamwork and communication, are important for health professionals to ensure holistic care. In holistic-care simulation training, receiving feedback is a regular step to help trainees assess and rethink their practice. Initial acceptance of feedback by trained health professionals will motivate them in changing behaviors. So, it is importance to increase the trainee's initial receptiveness of in-training feedback. Objective: This study aims to evaluate whether engaging trainees by actively giving feedback will increase their receptiveness to peer' feedback and motivate behavior changes in holistic care. Methods: Health professionals without previous holistic-care training were enrolled, and randomly divided into feedback-giver groups including A (bi-directional feedback recipients and givers group) and C (unidirectional feedback givers group) groups, and non-feedback givers group B (regular feedback recipients group). In addition to immediate satisfaction and receptiveness to in-training peer-feedback, the percentages of health professionals who are willing to make immediate and continuous motivated type of behavior-change were compared between groups. Results: Higher satisfaction score and higher percentage of motivated type behavior changes were noted in feedback-giving-groups (A and C) than those in non-feedback-giving group (B). The feedback training's effectiveness was confirmed by high preceptor approval of trainee's feedback skills and trainees' good receptivity to their peers' feedback. Self- and mentor-assessments revealed that initial positive receptiveness (determined by high positivity and usefulness scores) to peer's feedback is associated with more motivated-type behavior changes in their clinical practice. Conclusion: Current study suggested that feedback-giving training is a feasible strategy to increase receptiveness of participants to peer's feedback and activate participants' motivation to make the immediate and continuous behavior-type changes on giving holistic-care behavior-specific peer-feedback.