Using Bedside Rounds to Teach Communication Skills in the Internal Medicine Clerkship

BACKGROUND: Physicians' communication skills, which are linked to important patient outcomes, are rarely explicitly taught during the clinical years of medical school. This paper describes the development, implementation, and evaluation of a communication skills curriculum during the third-year Internal Medicine Clerkship. METHODS: In four two-hour structured bedside rounds with trained Internal Medicine faculty facilitators, students learned core communication skills in the context of common challenging clinical situations. In an end-of-clerkship survey students evaluated the curriculum's educational effectiveness. RESULTS: Over the course of a year, 160 third-year students and 15 faculty participated. Of the 75/160 (47%) of students who completed the post-clerkship survey, almost all reported improvement in their communication skills and their ability to deal with specific communication challenges. CONCLUSIONS: The curriculum appears to be a successful way to reinforce core communication skills and practice common challenging situations students encounter during the Internal Medicine Clerkship.