Objective: 
As is well known the ACGME is requiring residency programs to ensure their graduates are competent in communication skills. At the UPR School of Medicine Pediatric Residency Program a needs assessment revealed the need to develop an advanced communication skills curriculum. Four areas were identified as essential: giving bad news, communicating with difficult patients and families, communicating with adolescents, and answering telephone consults. The curriculum includes the use of Standardized Patients to teach, give feedback and evaluate each of these components. To evaluate the curriculum, the unit on Giving Bad News will be used as a “sample unit”. This unit was fully developed and will be implemented and tested on March 2004. The purpose of this study is to analyze the effectiveness of training Pediatric Residents in advanced communication skills using Standardized Patients.

Methods: 
Five Standardized Patients were trained in Giving Bad News following the SPIKES Protocol for Delivering Bad News. These SP’s were trained to simulate 6 different scenarios, one to use in the initial on-site demonstration, one to record a video of the right and the wrong techniques, two to use for practice sessions and two for the OSCE. They were also trained to evaluate residents using a checklist derived from the SPIKES Protocol, to give feedback during practice sessions and to serve as moderators during video discussions and role plays between residents. The first year residents will be divided into two groups, intervention and non-intervention. The intervention group will undergo 4 hours of training in Giving Bad News during the month of March 2004. At the end of the month, a 2 station OSCE will be given to both groups and the results will be compared.

Results: Pending

Conclusion: 
Final conclusions are pending but we hypothesize that the intervention group will perform significantly better than the non-intervention group in the OSCE.