The relationship between facilitating emotional cues and medical students’ clinical communication performance in qualifying exams.

A cross-sectional study design explored the relationship between medical students’ Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) clinical communication ratings and their responsiveness to simulated patient
(SP) verbal emotional cues in their qualifying OSCE. Data were collected from two cohorts of fourth-year medical students (n = 37), and responses to patient
cues that facilitated further disclosure or related discussion – known as provide space responses – from two OSCE communication stations were measured
by coding video footage with the Verona Coding Definition of Emotional Sequences (VR-CoDES).

The 37 medical students were representative of the larger cohort (n = 508) in terms of age. A significant positive correlation with a medium effect was found
between OSCE clinical communication ratings and provide space responses. OSCE clinical communication ratings could differentiate between students who
adopted patient-centred facilitative behaviours and those who did not.