‘Standardized patients’ in teaching the communication skill of history-taking to four-year foreign medical undergraduates in the department of obstetrics and gynaecology

BACKGROUND: Many foreign students have difficulty taking histories from Chinese patients, especially in clinical context of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. The efficacy of using standardized patients to prepare foreign students for communicating with Chinese patients and taking their histories was evaluated in this study. METHODS: Ninety-four four-year foreign students were assigned to one of three clinical sub-departments (gynaecology, obstetrics, and reproductive endocrinology) to practice history-taking; after practicing in one sub-department, the students were then crossed over to a different department. The histories were taken from real patients in the sub-departments of obstetrics and reproductive endocrinology and from standardized patients in the sub-department of gynaecology. Prior to contact with real patients in the sub-department of reproductive endocrinology, the students practised with standardized patients. The quality levels of the case reports generated in the three departments were compared by repeated measures ANOVA. The attitudes, satisfaction and suggestions of the students were also investigated through a questionnaire. RESULTS: The local Chinese language spoken by the patients was thought to be the most common difficulty students (76.7%) encountered while taking patient histories. Two-thirds and one-third of the students were interested in taking histories from standardized and real patients, respectively. Most students (94.2%) thought that working with standardized patients was useful for practising communication skills with Chinese patients. The total scores of the case reports were significantly different among the three groups (P < 0.001), and compared with case reports collected from real patients, case reports collected from standardized patients were of better quality. However, the quality of the case reports taken from real patients was better when the case reports were generated by students who had previous practice with standardized patients than when they were generated by students lacking such experience (P < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS: Standardized patient training for practising history-taking can be included as part of the clinical training curriculum for foreign medical undergraduates in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology in China. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12909-019-1541-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.