Effective communication in healthcare industry is vital in maintaining a good physician-patient relationship (Ramsay, 2008; Pincook, 2004). Patient safety and wellbeing can be compromised as a result of poor communication between members of the multi-disciplinary team and between staff and patients. Communication skills are verbal and non-verbal words, phrases, tone of voice, facial expressions, body languages and gestures that a person used in the interaction with patient. It is learnable, trainable and takes time to change. Difficult patient are ordinary people of vast background or experience who comes to the hospital because they have to instead of wanting to. At times, they are brought in unwillingly by their relatives et cetera. …show more content…
Standardised patients provide a safe, controlled learning and testing environment to prepare students to see real patients. It will be fair for students because the case is consistent for some SPs. Standardised patients can simulate the behavior of real people and thus, ensure similar experiences to student radiographers.
The standardised patient is proposed by Barrows (1971) as an instrument for evaluating medical education and is popular in healthcare field despite its high cost. The advantage of having SPs are firstly, they serve as a measuring tool that provide access to information that cannot be obtained from traditional sources such as performance of the physical examinations. Secondly, SP represent a standardised stimulus and controlled case-mix variability and some non-medical factors such as tone of voice et cetera (Hudon et al, 2003).
Unfortunately, there have been few articles which mentioned about the use of SPs in diagnostic radiography, the most common usage is mannequin or student models (Wood and Delay, 2014). A comparative trial was done to evaluate the use of SPs to enhance the clinical attachment to some year 3 students. In this article, report on whether the use of SPs in final year students’ clinical attachment is beneficial for …show more content…
Firstly, there are many studies which use SP with other teaching method, for example mini-evaluation exercise, multi-source feedbacks or in-training evaluation reports to test technique or communication. However, Hauer feel that it is necessary as it allow summative assessment of competence in multiple domains, particularly patient care and communication skills. Secondly, bias might be involved in such observer-participant based assessment. The various types of bias are summed up in appendix 2. There are also various types of sins of assessment involved and more description can be found in appendix 3. Observer must rate learner’s performance reliably by using various techniques such as calibrating using video-tape of learners’ performance, orientation of the various assessment forms to assessors before the start of the observation or to orientate learners’ expected performance level against predefined performance benchmark. There are some setbacks to such assessment, for example, trainees may be reluctant to be observed and educators may fail to provide meaningful feedback. Thus, the issue here is to ensure adequate training should be provided to