Training with virtual patients in transcultural psychiatry: do the learners actually learn?

BACKGROUND: The rapid increase in the number of patients with diverse ethnic backgrounds and previous exposure to severe mental trauma dictates the need for improvement in the quality of transcultural psychiatric health care through the development of relevant and effective training tools. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to evaluate the impact of training with a virtual patient on the learner's knowledge of posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms, clinical management, and basic communication skills. METHODS: The authors constructed an interactive educational tool based on virtual patient methodology that portrayed a refugee with severe symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder and depression. A total of 32 resident psychiatrists tested the tool and completed a pre-interaction and post-interaction knowledge test, including skills, at the time and several weeks later. RESULTS: All of the participants (N=32) completed the pre-interaction and post-interaction test, and 26 (81%) of them completed the online follow-up test. The mean pre-interaction score was 7.44 (male: 7.08, female: 7.65, no statistical significance). The mean post-interaction score was 8.47, which was significantly higher (P<.001) than the pre-interaction score (mean score 7.44). The mean score for the follow-up test several weeks later was 8.38, higher than the pre-interaction score by 0.69 points but not statistically significant. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that virtual patients can successfully facilitate the acquisition of core knowledge in the field of psychiatry, in addition to developing skills such as clinical reasoning, decision making, and history taking. Repeated training sessions with virtual patients are proposed in order to achieve sustainable educational effects.

Educational potential of a virtual patient system for caring for traumatized patients in primary care.

BACKGROUND: Virtual Patients (VPs) have been used in undergraduate healthcare education for many years. This project is focused on using VPs for training professionals to care for highly vulnerable patient populations. The aim of the study was to evaluate if Refugee Trauma VPs was perceived as an effective and engaging learning tool by primary care professionals (PCPs) in a Primary Health Care Centre (PHC). METHODS: A VP system was designed to create realistic and engaging VP cases for Refugee Trauma for training refugee patient interview, use of established trauma and mental health instruments as well as to give feedback to the learners. The patient interview section was based on video clips with a Bosnian actor with a trauma story and mental health problems. The video clips were recorded in Bosnian language to further increase the realism, but also subtitled in English. The system was evaluated by 11 volunteering primary health clinicians at the Lynn Community Health Centre, Lynn, Massachusetts, USA. The participants were invited to provide insights/feedback about the system's usefulness and educational value. A mixed methodological approach was used, generating both quantitative and qualitative data. RESULTS: Self-reported dimensions of clinical care, pre and post questionnaire questions on the PCPs clinical worldview, motivation to use the VP, and IT Proficiency. Construct items used in these questionnaires had previously demonstrated high face and construct validity. The participants ranked the mental status examination more positively after the simulation exercise compared to before the simulation. Follow up interviews supported the results. CONCLUSIONS: Even though virtual clinical encounters are quite a new paradigm in PHC, the participants in the present study considered our VP case to be a relevant and promising educational tool. Next phase of our project will be a RCT study including comparison with specially prepared paper-cases and determinative input on improving clinical diagnosis and treatment of the traumatized refugee patient.

Innovative training with virtual patients in transcultural psychiatry: the impact on resident psychiatrists' confidence.

BACKGROUND: Virtual patients are now widely accepted as efficient and safe training tools in medical education, but very little is known about their implementation in psychiatry, especially in transcultural clinical care of traumatized refugee patients. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed at assessing the impact of training with a virtual patient on confidence in providing clinical care for traumatized refugee patients. METHODS: The authors developed an educational tool based on virtual patient methodology portraying the case of "Mrs. K", a traumatized refugee woman with symptoms of PTSD and depression. A group (N=32) of resident psychiatrists tested the system and their confidence in different aspects of providing clinical care for this patient group was evaluated pre- and post-test by using a validated confidence questionnaire. Cronbach's α was calculated for all clusters. Changes between pre- and post-test were compared by using the matched-pair t-test, binomial distribution for exact significance test and a calculation of effect sizes (Cohen's d). RESULTS: A statistically significant improvement was exhibited in overall confidence (mean Δ: 0.34; p<0.0001; d: 0.89) as well as in four more specific domains of clinical care, with the area of identifying and evaluating trauma-related diagnoses and disability showing the most prominent improvement (mean Δ: 0.47; p<0.0001; d: 1.00). CONCLUSIONS: This VP-system can lead to physicians' improvement of confidence in providing transcultural clinical care for traumatized refugee patients. Further research is required to investigate improvement in actual performance and cognitive outcomes with several VPs and in a long-term effect perspective.

Age at onset of anorexia nervosa and breast cancer risk.

The objective of this study was to investigate breast cancer occurrence among women treated for anorexia nervosa (AN), with emphasis on age at the onset of this disorder. We conducted a register-based retrospective cohort with a total of 6009 women with at least one admission with an AN diagnosis during the period 1973-2003 in Sweden. During a mean follow-up of 13.4 years, information on 80 057 women-years was generated. The standardized incidence ratio (SIR)--the ratio of observed-to-expected number of cases--was used as the measure of relative risk. Overall, 16 women developed breast cancer versus 25.5 expected cases [SIR: 0.6, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.4-0.9]. Among women who were first admitted for AN between the age of 10 and 24 years, four developed breast cancer versus 11.3 expected (SIR: 0.4, 95% CI: 0.1-0.9). In this group of women with early onset AN, only one parous woman developed breast cancer versus 6.3 expected (SIR: 0.2, 95% CI: 0-0.9). Among women first hospitalized for AN between the age of 25 and 40 years, 12 developed breast cancer, whereas the expected number was 14.2, a nonsignificant deficit. Our results suggest that early onset AN may play an important role in the development of breast cancer, possibly because of the extreme restriction of energy intake at a crucial period for mammary gland development. Late onset AN is likely to play a relatively less important role.