The teaching of crisis counseling skills to pediatric residents: a one-year study.

Pediatric residents should learn to manage family crises such as informing parents that their child has a potentially life-threatening illness. Unfortunately, few training programs prepare residents to counsel parents of a child with cancer. An experiential parent crisis counseling program has been developed at the Children's Hospital National Medical Center in Washington, DC; this program has demonstrated that pediatric residents, with limited instruction, can be taught to give bad news to parents using effective information-giving and interpersonal skills.