David Mathew 
Nien Yue Koh 

Background 

Basic communication skills were taught in the earlier years of study in the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine; communications in the clinical context is typically taught from the third year of study onward. 

Students desire to be in the "hot seat" and be assessed on their performance. However, due to a progressively larger student cohort and challenges in recruiting faculty to perform real time feedback on-site due to their individual clinical commitments, not all students would get the chance. 

We introduced the concept of role play videos, whereby students were tasked to role play as either the medical student or the patient and film themselves. The videos were then submitted to the clinical faculty, who would review and provide feedback on the students’ performance. 

50% fewer faculty were required for remote assessment of the students’ performance compared to real-time assessment on-site. Students gave a feedback score of 4.35/5 for this learning activity and deemed feedback provided by the faculty to be helpful and informative. 

The use of role play videos brought about an additional dimension to clinical communications learning. The primary aim of requiring fewer faculty for the module was achieved. In addition, more students could benefit from evaluation by the clinical faculty. Given that faculty could watch the videos at their own time, they were less constrained by time, were able to review the students' performance closely at a relatively relaxed pace and subsequently provided more detailed feedback. 

Role play videos with remote assessment by the clinical faculty appears to be one of the feasible strategies to manage the challenges in the teaching and assessment of clinical communications, allowing for reduction in faculty resource requirement without loss of quality of learning experience and with added benefit of more detailed feedback for students.