Introducing Role Play for Teaching Communication Skills to Dental Undergraduate Students

Abstract

Background and Objectives: Communication skills are considered to be an important and integral part of successful patient treatment. At our institute undergraduate students are given formal education in behavioural management during the first year. However, clinical training on patients is started only during the third year. The intervening gap in training results in the students not developing satisfactory communication skills while interacting with patients in the third year. The objectives of this study were to: 1) Use role play as a learning tool to demonstrate importance of communication skills and train students in the same. 2) Determine whether formal training in communication skills should be given at the beginning of third year before starting treatment procedures on patients. 3) Assess the response of students to role play and level of confidence while treating patient through a questionnaire format. Methodology: Role play was conducted to demonstrate the effect of satisfactory and unsatisfactory communication between a doctor and patient. A questionnaire was given to the students before and after the role play in order to determine their response to the role play and the results were statistically analyzed. Results & Conclusion: A high percentage of students felt that formal training in communication skills would be beneficial at the start of their clinical training in the third year and the role play had a positive impact on their ability to communicate with patients. However, the increase in the level of confidence was not found to be statistically significant. [Patankar A NJIRM 2015; 6(5):81-85]