It's been emotional: the communication OSCE as a valid measure of medical student’s responsiveness to patient emotion.

Background and Purpose Few studies have examined the transfer of medical student’s clinical communication skills from the simulated OSCE to patient consultations in Primary care. This is surprising given the centrality of the OSCE in the assessment of medical student communication skills, and consistent calls by researchers and educators to incorporate "authentic" patient encounters in research. This study aims to explore the relationship between 4th year medical student’s emotional responsiveness to simulated patient cues in the OSCE, to their emotional responsiveness to patient cues in the clinical setting (primary care) in 5th year. Methodology 37 medical students were videoed in their final 4th year communication OSCE. The same cohort was then also videoed in several patient consultations each (n=138) in the following 5th placement based year. All videos were micro-coded to analyse medical student’s responses to patient emotional cues with the Verona Consensus Coding Scheme 1. Results Medical students were consistently missing a significant proportion of simulated patient and patient emotional cues in both settings. A significant positive relationship (with a large effect size) was also found between medical students responsiveness to simulated patient emotional cues in the OSCE and patient emotional cues in the clinical setting (primary care). Discussion and Conclusions This 4th year communication OSCE is a valid measure of medical student’s responsiveness to patient emotion in the clinical setting (primary care). This provides some support for the notion that the OSCE clinical communication rating sheet adopted at the University of Liverpool, can adequately differentiate between medical students who respond to patient emotion and those who fail to 3 / 6 respond to patient emotion. The presentation will also discuss the potential use of behavioural coding schemes in the training of medical students. References 1. Del Piccolo, L., de Haes, H., Heaven, C., Jansen, J., Verheul, W., Bensing, J., et al. (2011). Development of the Verona coding definitions of emotional sequences to code health providers’ responses