Assessment for consultation competence of resident general practitioners in Shanghai / 中华全科医师杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective To assess consultation competence of resident general practitioners in Shanghai. Methods Standardized patients (SPs) were employed as an assessment tool in exploring consultation competence of resident general practitioners ( GPs) , including clinical and communication skills. Clinical skills included information collection, clinical thinking, health education, out-patient history taking and recording and reception time management, and patient-physician communication skills included building a good relationship, information collection and feedback, understanding issues from patient's perspective, sharing information and obtaining informed consent and close of consultation. Score rate defined as actual score of each item divided by total score of the domain was employed to assess competence of GPs in varied aspects. Results There were 157 resident GPs, 52 men and 105 women, with an average age of (28 ±2) years. Overall score rate of clinical skills averaged (76 ±10) percent, and score rate of each item ranking from the highest to the lowest was reception time management (91 ±4) percent, out-patient history taking and recording (80 ±14) percent, information collection (76 ±12) percent, clinical thinking (74 ±17) percent, health education (68 ±1) percent. Overall score rate of communication skills averaged (74 ±12) percent, and score rate of each item ranking from the highest to the lowest was building a good patient-physician relationship (86 ±3) percent, information collection and feedback (80 ±5) percent, sharing information and obtaining informed consent (74 ±15 ) percent, close of consultation (62 ±27 ) percent and understanding issues from patient's perspective (43 ±0) percent. Conclusions Resident GPs have improved their consultation competence to certain extent after standardized training, but there still exist some weakness to be improved in them.