Psychological characteristics of students in learning clinical interview skills with the use of virtual patient
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Open Access
Psychological characteristics of students in learning clinical interview skills with the use of virtual patient Bartosz Zalewski1 , Maciej Walkiewicz2*
and Mateusz Guziak3
Abstract Background: The goal of this exploratory study is to analyse which psychological characteristics of students are related to the effectiveness of learning clinical interview skills with the use of a virtual patient (VP). Methods: The sample consisted of 29 final-year clinical psychology students. The authors’ VP tool was used for measuring and teaching clinical interview skills: building contact with the patient, gathering important information, and identifying the students’ mistakes. Psychological questionnaires were used to measure the students’ psychological features: need for cognitive closure, ability to achieve cognitive structure, beliefs in the changeability of human traits, level of hope, intelligence, positive vs negative affect, and academic knowledge. Results: The most important aspect of the diagnostician’s psychological features which substantially influence effectiveness of learning interview skills is belief in the stability or changeability of human traits and the need to achieve cognitive closure. Participants who have a belief in human changeability are able to perform the task correctly even without training, while those who believe in human stability improve only slightly with training. Students with lower need of cognitive closure successfully learned to build a good relation with the patient. Conclusions: The study allows a better understanding of the phenomena occurring during the learning of clinical interview skills with the use of a VP. Keywords: Interview, Decision-making, Clinical reasoning, Virtual patient, Simulation, Assessment of clinical skills
Background The diagnostic process is a complex, patient-centred, collaborative activity that involves building contact with the patient and gathering diagnostic information [1, 2]. Building contact is the leading task, enabling the collection of relevant information that will be used to build diagnostic hypotheses [2]. The clinical interview concerns a set of questions describing the problem, such as: examples of a problem situation, how the subject understands his or her symptoms, expectations of treatment and resources [3]. * Correspondence: [email protected] 2 Department of Psychology, Medical University of Gdańsk, Tuwima 15 Street, 80-210 Gdańsk, Poland Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
An effective interview structure ensures that all areas of potential clinical concerns are assessed [4]. What is more, it is of high importance to avoid mistakes, e.g.: giving interpretations or advices instead of questions, offering suggestions, providing evaluations of patient behaviours [1]. The literature shows little interest in the matter of the individual psychological characteristics such as basic cognitive and affective processes in the context of clinical interview [5–9]. Nonetheless,
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