Impact of education on smoking cessation counseling by surgical residents

The use of simulated patients and role-play in communication skills training: A review of the literature to August 2005

“…Despite this improvement, interactional skills remained at a low level, as noted by some other studies [37,38]. Similarly, Steinemann et al [43] found that surgical residents who were randomized to either an evidence based medicine study group or a role-play group (following a didactic lecture on smoking cessation) demonstrated significantly increased skill in smoking cessation counseling skills. There were no significant differences between groups in the amount of improvement made, although it should be noted that only 25 residents participated.…”

“…Another possible confounding factor reported was the stage of study of the two groups of students (one medical school taught pelvic examination in the second year, and the other in the third year)-the third years were trained by the laywoman, but their communication skills may have been more advanced because they have more experience of using communication skills in practice. Other studies [41][42][43] have shown that the use of simulated patients and/or role-play produced improvements no greater than other interactive methods of training, although two studies [41,43] may not have been statistically powerful enough to detect between group differences. It should also be noted that the students in the Peters et al [41] study were told to practice the nine steps of microcounseling that had been taught before the assessment.…”

“…Many studies use simulated patients and/or role-play in combination with a number of other teaching methods, such as feedback and group discussion, making it difficult to deduce whether it is the actual use of simulated patients/role-play that have contributed to the greatest improvements in specific communication skills, or whether it is a combination of the practice and rehearsal of skills with other methods of training. Some of the studies reviewed used small sample sizes [36,37,41,43] with one study containing only six participants in each group for comparison [36], and another randomizing just eighteen students [37]. Only two of the studies reviewed conducted a statistical power calculation [9,31].…”

“…This review examined studies where communication skills were taught for a number of different contexts, including sexual health [25,34,36], breaking bad news [23], behavior change [30,31,38,[42][43][44], cancer [9,39] and domestic violence [24,33]. Trainees may, for whatever reason, have found it easier to implement communication skills in some contexts rather than others, and this warrants further investigation.…”

Postgraduate education for doctors in smoking cessation

“…& I. H.) had reviewed the title and were retrieved in full text. On review of the full text by these two authors only two were found to be relevant [22,23]. The reasons for excluding other articles were that they did not describe postgraduate educational programs, the programs described were not aimed at doctors or the programs described were from European countries (Table 2).…”