Development and evaluation of a risk communication curriculum for medical students

ObjectiveTo develop, pilot, and evaluate a curriculum for teaching clinical risk communication skills to medical students.MethodsA new experience-based curriculum, “Risk Talk,” was developed and piloted over a 1-year period among students at Tufts University School of Medicine. An experimental study of 2nd-year students exposed vs. unexposed to the curriculum was conducted to evaluate the curriculum's efficacy. Primary outcome measures were students’ objective (observed) and subjective (self-reported) risk communication competence; the latter was assessed using an Observed Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) employing new measures.ResultsTwenty-eight 2nd-year students completed the curriculum, and exhibited significantly greater (p < .001) objective and subjective risk communication competence than a convenience sample of 24 unexposed students. New observational measures of objective competence in risk communication showed promising evidence of reliability and validity. The curriculum was resource-intensive.ConclusionThe new experience-based clinical risk communication curriculum was efficacious, although resource-intensive. More work is needed to develop the feasibility of curriculum delivery, and to improve the measurement of competence in clinical risk communication.Practice implicationsRisk communication is an important advanced communication skill, and the Risk Talk curriculum provides a model educational intervention and new assessment tools to guide future efforts to teach and evaluate this skill.