Training Medical Students in the Use of Lay Language When Obtaining Informed Consent

Le résumé fourni par la source

This study seeks to determine if participating in a workshop to practice obtaining informed consent would help medical students develop skills to more effectively communicate and obtain informed consent from patients in future encounters. We hypothesized that students who participated in the workshop would be less likely to use medical jargon while obtaining informed consent during a standardized patient encounter than students who did not participate in said workshops. Twenty-six first year medical students participated in an optional 20- minute collaborative workshop on how to properly deliver and obtain informed consent for a shoulder injection procedure. Several weeks later students conducted required standardized patient encounters, during which they had to obtain informed consent for a knee arthrocentesis. Videos of the encounters were analyzed for the 26 participants and a control group of 26 randomly selected students who did not participate in the workshop. Analysis included documenting words and phrases identified as jargon used during the informed consent portion of the encounter, the number of times they were, whether they were explained, and if the explanation was at the prompting of the standardized patient. We found that there was no significant difference in the instances of jargon used between students who participated in the workshop and those students who did not participate. However, workshop participants explained the jargon they used 72% of the time, compared with only 56% of the time for students who did not participate.

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