Medical Students Cooperate With Patients and Communication Students to Design Audiovisual Patient Education

Abstract

Having access to health information makes patients feel more empowered in making decisions about their healthcare. However, the reliability and applicability of online health information is difficult to assess. To give patients the tools to make decisions about their own care, doctors need to inform patients in and outside of the doctor’s office. To teach future doctors the communication skills needed for this, we developed a new educational course called CLIKCS: Co-creating onLine Information Knowledge Clips for Society. During the course medical students designed knowledge clips in cooperation with patients and Communication and Information Sciences (CIS) students. The aim of this research was to evaluate how the course improved the science communication skills of medical students. Twelve sixth-year medical students, six patients and three third-year CIS students participated in this study. If and how medical students improved their communication skills was evaluated by analyzing the storyboards, assessing the knowledge clips and conducting interviews with the medical students. The knowledge clip assessment showed that the medical students succeeded in making suitable patient education materials and comparing the first and second draft of the storyboard showed that they improved their skills during the course. Finally, the interviews indicated that cooperating with the patient and to a lesser extent with the CIS student improved the science communication skills of the medical students by making them understand the experiences, perspective and information needs of the patients and by helping them become aware of how to convey medical information in an understandable way.