Skills for Interviewing Adolescent Patients: Sustainability of Structured Feedback in Undergraduate Education on Performance in Residency

BACKGROUND: Effective adolescent (10 to 19 years) interviewing by physicians is an essential skill that many trainees can find challenging.

OBJECTIVE: We assessed whether structured adolescent interviewing using standardized patients (SPs) and feedback in undergraduate medical education (UME) has a sustained effect on residents' skills.

METHODS: Postgraduate year (PGY) 1 residents conducted interviews with a SP adolescent-mother pair. The SPs independently scored each PGY-1 interview using the structured communication adolescent guide (SCAG). Unpaired t tests were conducted comparing "Total-Item" and "Global" scores of PGY-1s who received structured SP adolescent interviewing with feedback in UME ("structured training" group) to those who had not ("no structured training" group).

RESULTS: PGY-1s in the structured training group (n = 23) received significantly higher mean Total-Item scores from both the SP adolescent (40.78 ± 7.04 and 32.41 ± 10.12, respectively; P = .001) and the SP mother (40.48 ± 7.90 and 33.34 ± 10.90, respectively; P = .01) than those without structured training (n = 29). Statistically significant results favoring PGY-1s with prior training were also seen with the SP adolescent and mother total Global SCAG scores.

CONCLUSIONS: Structured training in adolescent interviewing with SPs and feedback in UME appears to have a sustained effect on residents' adolescent interviewing skills. PGY-1s will interview adolescents and may benefit from structured adolescent SP interviewing with feedback, especially individuals who did not have this experience during their medical school training.