Forrest Lang

Patients Prefer the Method of “Tell Back- Collaborative Inquiry” to Assess Understanding of Medical Information

Purpose: The goal of this study was to determine which approach to assessing understanding of medical information patients most prefer and perceive to be most effective. Methods: Two videos were shown to participants: (1) a physician explaining a medical condition and its treatment and (2) a physician inquiring about patient understanding of the medical information the patient had been given using 3 different types of inquiry: Yes-No, Tell Back-Collaborative, and Tell Back-Directive. Results: The Tell Back-Collaborative inquiry was significantly preferred over the other 2 approaches. Conclusions: Patients strongly prefer the Tell Back-Collaborative inquiry when assessing their understanding. We recommend that physicians ask patients to restate what they understand using their own words and that they use a patient-centered approach.

Faculty development in communication skills instruction: insights from a longitudinal program with "real-time feedback".

Responsibility for teaching communication skills often falls to a multidisciplinary group of faculty who lack both a common model for teaching and prior experience teaching communication in small groups. This article describes East Tennessee State Universitys multifaceted faculty development program in teaching communication skills. The program was developed and implemented in three phases. First, a two-step Delphi approach helped identify core communication skills. Phase two gave faculty the opportunity to practice identifying communication teaching issues and effective strategies for working with small groups. The third phase involved the videotaping of faculty teaching small groups of students. These tapes were reviewed both individually and in faculty groups. The tapes were also reviewed by students, who provided realtime, moment-to-moment feedback to the faculty. Implementation and review of the program has helped to identify new strategies for effectively facilitating small-group teaching of communication skills.

The Appalachian Preceptorship: Over Two Decades of an Integrated Clinical-Classroom Experience of Rural Medicine and Appalachian Culture

There is a need to encourage careers in rural medicine and to prepare potential rural physicians for life in rural communities. The authors describe a program that addresses this need, the Appalachian Preceptorship Program, and report the program’s experience from 1985 to 2004. The Appalachian Preceptorship is a four-week summer elective conducted by the Department of Family Medicine of East Tennessee State University (ETSU) that offers students clinical preceptorships in rural areas of southern Appalachia. By the conclusion of the 2004 preceptorships, the program had served 225 medical students from 95 medical schools across the country and abroad. The program combines an individual community-based preceptorship with an interactive group instructional block, emphasizes rural medicine, and provides students an understanding of the interface between culture and medicine in southern Appalachia. Follow-up of Appalachian Preceptorship students during the 18-year period studied demonstrates that 82% of the 157 participants who matched before 2004 had selected residencies in primary care, with 60% entering family medicine. Those completing the program were more than three times as likely to practice in a rural community compared with the national average. Fifty-six percent of their practice settings carry multiple rural or underserved designations. The program has helped transform a legislative mandate to train doctors for rural communities into an institutional culture leading to more extensive programs and a greater recognition of ETSU’s rural mission. The authors encourage other medical schools to develop combined clinical/classroom electives that reflect their institutional priorities and that can address a wide variety of clinical interests.