THE EFFECT OF COMMUNICATION SKILLS TEACHING IN FINAL-YEAR MEDICAL STUDENTS
THE EFFECT OF COMMUNICATION SKILLS TEACHING IN FINAL-YEAR MEDICAL STUDENTS

Summary/Abstract: The World Federation of Medical Education encourages the teaching of generic skills including communication skills, together with technical skill training in medical schools. Medical Universities in Myanmar started teaching communication skills as a formal content in the curriculum five years ago. But it was included in the assessment as an Objectively Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) station, starting only from 2012. The underlying philosophy is that improving the communication between doctor and patient will improve the ability to gather the information needed to solve the problems of a particular patient and in presenting the formulated problem list and management plan. The aim of this study is to determine the pass rate of the Communication Skills (CS) station and association between communication skills score and Objectively Structured Long-case Assessment Record (OSLAR) score. It was a retrospective cross-sectional descriptive study analyzing the scores of the last three completion tests of 363 final-year medical students, in University of Medicine 2, in Yangon, Myanmar.In the communication skills station, 290 out of 363 (79.9%) passed. For OSLAR, the pass rate was 288 out of 363 (79.3%), and for OSCE it was 279 out of 363 (76.9%). There was a significant association between passing communication skills and OSLAR (χ 2 = 10.2, p = .001). Especially, there was correlation between the history taking part of OSLAR scores and CS scores (r = .257, p = 0.000). To test whether it was because of the phenomenon that good students will pass whatever station it is and poor students will fail, association between communication skills score and OSCE (the station where the students do not need to speak and are tested for manual skills only) was analyzed. There was no association between those two skill stations.

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