Smoking history-taking skills: a simple guide to teach medical students

Abstract

Many doctors rate themselves as ineffective smoking cessation counsellors. It is logical to initiate training efforts with medical students. We incorporated smoking history-taking in the physical diagnosis course at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill using a simple method to teach smoking history-taking skills and to assess its effectiveness as an educational intervention. The principal intervention was the distribution of a one-sheet Smoking-History Taking and Counseling Guide, adapted from the American Lung Association's Freedom From Smoking for You and Your Family self-help manual. The second intervention was a single prompt for 50% of the course preceptors. Students' smoking history-taking skills were evaluated in the Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) at the end of the course. Students who received the guide did significantly better on the OSCE, even after controlling for having discussed taking a smoking history with their preceptors. A simple guide combined with a one-time prompting of preceptors has a positive effect on the acquisition of smoking history-taking skills by the medical students. This strategy may also be useful for teaching and evaluating smoking-cessation counselling skills, for which good smoking history-taking is a necessary basis.

Reliability and validity of OSCE checklists used to assess the communication skills of undergraduate medical students: A systematic review

“…Twenty five studies reported the duration of CS stations, with the shortest being 5 min long and the longest being 20 min long [11,, whilst almost half of the reviewed papers ranged from 5 to 8 min [11,24,[26][27][28][29][30][31]33,[36][37][38][39][42][43][44]. Four studies reported short and long case scenarios with obviously different durations [11,31,32,37], in contrast to nine studies which did not report station length at all [15,[47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55].…”

“…Four studies reported short and long case scenarios with obviously different durations [11,31,32,37], in contrast to nine studies which did not report station length at all [15,[47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55]. Sixteen studies reported references to validity and reliability studies of the assessment forms being used [11,15,24,26,27,30,39,40,[42][43][44][45][46][52][53][54], whilst six studies reported only validity ( [31,33,37,50,55], and twelve reported only reliability [25,28,32,[34][35][36]38,41,[47][48][49]51]. Two studies compared assessments of medical student CS across different institutions [4...…”

“…Fourteen papers reported the use of checklists or global rating scales [15,28,29,34,35,38,41,43,45,46,[50][51][52]55], while global rating scales were described in 3 of the 14 papers by Park [34], Wass [43] and Hodges [15], respectively, in Park's paper students were assessed by SP raters only [34]. However we identified 11 papers not reporting any measurement instruments in terms of a documented list of items described in the paper or an appendix [24,25,30,32,36,39,42,44,47,53,54].…”

A Randomized Controlled Pilot Trial of the Functional Assessment Screening Tablet to Engage Patients at the Point of Care

“…19 Information regarding physical activity is collected using a single item based on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines that asks if patients engage in at least 30 minutes of moderate physical activity, 5 days per week. 20 HRQoL is collected using the RAND-36 Health Status Inventory.…”

Awareness of the Harmful Effects of Smoking and Views on Smoking Cessation Intervention among Japanese Medical Students.

“…Almost no studies have been made concerning this point in this country. A simple method using a sheet of smoking history-taking and counseling guide has been proven to be effective to learn appropriate skills and seems to be useful amongour students (24). Not all questionnaires distributed were returned, which could cause a bias in the result.…”