Using patient-instructors to teach and evaluate interviewing skills.

The teaching and evaluation of clinical interviewing skills is a continuing challenge for medicine and dentistry. The use of patient-instructors who provide consistency in presenting scenarios has recently been pioneered in dental education. This program focused primarily on teaching and used patient-instructors to give individual feedback from the patient's perspective to students after each of five scenarios. Feedback was constructive and behaviorally oriented so that it could be applied immediately to succeeding scenarios. Rating instruments assessed both process and content skills. Results indicated that students improved significantly in interpersonal interviewing skills as they progressed through the exercise. Content skills improved only slightly. Student and faculty reaction was positive. The program is an effective and time efficient means of teaching history taking and interviewing skills as well as an effective evaluation tool.