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A scoping review: virtual patients for communication skills in medical undergraduates

BACKGROUND: Communication is an essential competence for medical students. Virtual patients (VP), computerized educational tools where users take the role of doctor, are increasingly used. Despite the wide range of VP utilization, evidence-based practical guidance on supporting development of commun...

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Autores principales: Kelly, Síle, Smyth, Erica, Murphy, Paul, Pawlikowska, Teresa
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9166208/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35659213
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12909-022-03474-9
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author Kelly, Síle
Smyth, Erica
Murphy, Paul
Pawlikowska, Teresa
author_facet Kelly, Síle
Smyth, Erica
Murphy, Paul
Pawlikowska, Teresa
author_sort Kelly, Síle
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Communication is an essential competence for medical students. Virtual patients (VP), computerized educational tools where users take the role of doctor, are increasingly used. Despite the wide range of VP utilization, evidence-based practical guidance on supporting development of communication skills for medical students remains unclear. We focused this scoping review on VP affordance for student learning especially important in the current environment of constrained patient access. METHODS: This scoping review followed Arksey & O’Malley’s methodology. We tested and used a search strategy involving six databases, resulting in 5,262 citations. Two reviewers independently screened titles, full texts (n= 158) and finally performed data extraction on fifty-five included articles. To support consideration of educational affordance the authors employed a pragmatic framework (derived from activity theory) to map included studies on VP structure, curricular alignment, mediation of VP activity, and socio-cultural context. RESULTS: Findings suggest that not only the VP itself, but also its contextualization and associated curricular activities influence outcomes. The VP was trialled in the highest proportion of papers as a one-off intervention (19 studies), for an average duration of 44.9 minutes (range 10-120min), mainly in senior medical students (n=23), notably the largest group of studies did not have VP activities with explicit curricular integration (47%). There was relatively little repeated practice, low levels of feedback, self-reflection, and assessment. Students viewed VPs overall, citing authenticity and ease of use as important features. Resource implications are often omitted, and costings would facilitate a more complete understanding of implications of VP use. CONCLUSION: Students should be provided with maximal opportunity to draw out the VPs’ full potential through repeated practice, without time-constraint and with curricular alignment. Feedback delivery enabling reflection and mastery is also key. The authors recommend educators to explicitly balance computerized authenticity with instructional design integrated within the curriculum. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12909-022-03474-9.
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spelling pubmed-91662082022-06-05 A scoping review: virtual patients for communication skills in medical undergraduates Kelly, Síle Smyth, Erica Murphy, Paul Pawlikowska, Teresa BMC Med Educ Research BACKGROUND: Communication is an essential competence for medical students. Virtual patients (VP), computerized educational tools where users take the role of doctor, are increasingly used. Despite the wide range of VP utilization, evidence-based practical guidance on supporting development of communication skills for medical students remains unclear. We focused this scoping review on VP affordance for student learning especially important in the current environment of constrained patient access. METHODS: This scoping review followed Arksey & O’Malley’s methodology. We tested and used a search strategy involving six databases, resulting in 5,262 citations. Two reviewers independently screened titles, full texts (n= 158) and finally performed data extraction on fifty-five included articles. To support consideration of educational affordance the authors employed a pragmatic framework (derived from activity theory) to map included studies on VP structure, curricular alignment, mediation of VP activity, and socio-cultural context. RESULTS: Findings suggest that not only the VP itself, but also its contextualization and associated curricular activities influence outcomes. The VP was trialled in the highest proportion of papers as a one-off intervention (19 studies), for an average duration of 44.9 minutes (range 10-120min), mainly in senior medical students (n=23), notably the largest group of studies did not have VP activities with explicit curricular integration (47%). There was relatively little repeated practice, low levels of feedback, self-reflection, and assessment. Students viewed VPs overall, citing authenticity and ease of use as important features. Resource implications are often omitted, and costings would facilitate a more complete understanding of implications of VP use. CONCLUSION: Students should be provided with maximal opportunity to draw out the VPs’ full potential through repeated practice, without time-constraint and with curricular alignment. Feedback delivery enabling reflection and mastery is also key. The authors recommend educators to explicitly balance computerized authenticity with instructional design integrated within the curriculum. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12909-022-03474-9. BioMed Central 2022-06-03 /pmc/articles/PMC9166208/ /pubmed/35659213 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12909-022-03474-9 Text en © The Author(s) 2022 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
spellingShingle Research
Kelly, Síle
Smyth, Erica
Murphy, Paul
Pawlikowska, Teresa
A scoping review: virtual patients for communication skills in medical undergraduates
title A scoping review: virtual patients for communication skills in medical undergraduates
title_full A scoping review: virtual patients for communication skills in medical undergraduates
title_fullStr A scoping review: virtual patients for communication skills in medical undergraduates
title_full_unstemmed A scoping review: virtual patients for communication skills in medical undergraduates
title_short A scoping review: virtual patients for communication skills in medical undergraduates
title_sort scoping review: virtual patients for communication skills in medical undergraduates
topic Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9166208/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35659213
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12909-022-03474-9
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