Teaching Medical Students How to Break Bad News with Standardized Patients

One of the biggest challenges that a physician will face is conveying difficult news (CDN) to a patient. The ability to provide this information may either strengthen or destroy the patient-physician relationship. Despite the importance of this skill, formal education for medical students has been limited. To improve upon skill building in the medical student experience, fourth year medical students (on their oncology clerkship) spent 3 hours partaking in a CDN session. During this session, each student had a videotaped encounter with a standardized patient, followed by a small group discussion and review of the tape with other students and a clinician. We evaluated the experience with pre- and post-questionnaires assessing overall knowledge, satisfaction, and specific components of the curriculum. The objective of this study was to review our institution's educational program focused on teaching techniques for CDN.