Effective communication in pediatric palliative care: Evaluation of two educational videos.

Abstract

In pediatric palliative care, effective communication is one of the most important skills. However, physicians often lack proper training. This study examines how to enhance medical students' ability to deliver a life-limiting diagnosis to parents. For this, we evaluated the effectiveness of two educational videos. We randomly assigned 114 medical students to two intervention groups and one control group. The intervention consisted of two different educational videos. We used self-assessment instruments and objective measures. Group-specific differences were analyzed using (repeated measures) Analysis of Variance, accounting for the effects of covariates, and t-tests. Analysis of self-assessed communication skills identified a positive effect of the 'time x group' interaction (F (2) = 3.25, p = 0.042, n_p²= 0.055), indicating a statistically significant increase in both intervention groups. A positive effect of both videos on performance was observed for one item. An acting or animated video can have a small but significant impact on self-assessed communication skills and objectively assessed behaviour for medical students with varying levels of experience in delivering bad news to parents. Further research is required to investigate the long-term impact of educational videos on the communication behaviour of providers interacting with parents.