Medical training for communication of bad news: A literature review

In recent years, medical guidelines for communicating bad news to patients have been published. Training for this task was included in the curricula of undergraduate medical courses, specialization, and continuing medical education. The objective of this review is to evaluate the existing evidence in the literature on the effectiveness of such training. Only seven controlled trials were found, four of which were randomized, and these four indicate an improvement in the trainees. These findings suggest that training undergraduate and postgraduate doctors in skills for communicating bad news may be beneficial but there are important limitations to reach a definitive conclusion. These limitations are discussed in this article.