Interpersonal skills training for dental students.

Abstract

Recently authors have suggested the importance of the dentist-patient relationship in dealing with patients' fear and anxiety and in motivating patients to seek and accept treatment, involve themselves in their own health care, and comply with recomrnendations made by dentists. It has been suggested that effective communication and relationship skills are essential for effective delivery of dental health care (1). To meet this need, a course in communication sLlls is provided for all freshman dental students at the University of Mississippi School of Dentistry. The course is based primarily on the human relations training method3 of Blakeman and is systematic and developmental, progressing through six modules on skills of structuring, attending, basic responding, additive responding, asserting, and terminating. The present study was a preliminary evaluation of the effectiveness of this course in increasing students' skills of discrimination and communication, i.e., the ability to discriminate the cognitive and emotional aspects of the patient's message accurately and to offer a response which communicates understanding. Subjects, 45 freshman dental students, completed a standardized five-point rating scale (2). used to assess the skills of discrimination and communication. Response measures included use of written responses to written, audio- and videotape stimulus material as well as use of taped verbal responses to role-playing patients. The communication index included statements by patients to which the student was requested to write the most helpful response by a dentist. The responses were rated on the Carkhuff scale. The discrimination index was based on a series of sratements by patients, each one followed by four dentists' responses that vary in helpfulness as defined by the training model. Students were asked to rate each response on the basis of the Carkhuff scale and the resulting ratings were compared to expert ratings to derive an average deviation score. Pretest means on the discrimination index (1.25) and communication index (1.40) were compared with posnest means on both indexes (.65, 3.00, respectively) using nonparametric matched-pairs signed-ranks analyses (3). Results showed that posrtest scores were significantly different from pretest scores on both the discrimination index (2 = 5.67, p < .001) and communication index (Z = 6.57, p < .001). Significant gains were noted in abiliry of students to discriminate responses that may be helpful to patients from those chat may be less so or harmful and in ability to perceive the feelings and content of messages and to respond verbally so that the patient feels understood. These basic empathy and personalizing skills have been shown to be an essential element in effective interpersonal relationships in the literature on counseling (1, 2).