Responding to patients' emotions: important for standardized patient satisfaction.

Background and Objectives: Several experts have emphasized the need to respond to a patient's emotions as an essential component of effective medical interviewing. This study examined the relationship of faculty observers' scores of students' performance in standardized patient (SP) interviewing stations in a family medicine clerkship objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) with SP satisfaction measures.
Methods: The faculty observers scored students in the following performance domains: 1) interviewing skills, 2) negotiating the diagnosis or plan, 3) gathering case-specific content information, 4) responding to the patient's emotions, and 5) student's overall performance. Pearson Product-Moment correlations were calculated for each of these domains and the Standardized Patient Satisfaction Questionnaire (SPSQ) scores.
Results: There were moderate correlations between the SPSQ score and the overall OSCE score (.45) and the response to patient's emotions skill score (.36). The faculty observer's response to patient's emotion score correlated highly with the student's overall OSCE score (.75).
Conclusions: A student's ability to respond to the patient's emotions appears to be an important skill for successful medical interviewing from both the faculty observer's perspective and the SP's perspective. Results also demonstrate that the SP's perspective is similar, but not identical, to the faculty observer's perspective, suggesting that SPs have an important evaluative role in student assessment.