The Effect of a Structured, Home-based Interview With a Patient on First-year Medical Students' Patient-centredness.

Background Doctors are regarded as professionals, and specific teaching on professional behaviour is considered important in many countries. For medical students, early patient contact experiences were found to be an important way of learning about professionalism, and learning activities promoting critical reflection were particularly effective. Medical students consider that patient-centredness is one of the most important aspects of medical professionalism, and the PPOS questionnaire has been used extensively in measuring the attitudes of medical students towards patient-centredness. The PPOS-D12 questionnaire is a validated German version of that questionnaire. The study aim is to assess how a structured, in-depth, home-based interview with a patient with a chronic illness affects first-year medical students' patient-centredness. Methods In this randomised controlled trial, medical students who are in the first year of their studies at the University of Bern will be randomised to either seeing a patient with a chronic illness for a structured, in-depth interview in their own home (the intervention), or to reading an educational document that gives information about consultation skills (the sham comparator). Students will complete the PPOS-D12 survey before and after the interventions, so that changes in their scores can be calculated, and the mean scores of the two groups compared. Secondary outcomes will be the effect of students' gender and prior exposure to chronic illness in the participant or her/his close relatives and friends on their PPOS-D12 scores. A nested study will measure the strength of association between the GP teachers' own levels of patient/doctor-centredness and changes in their students' levels over the year. Discussion This research will consider the effect of an in-depth, structured interview with a patient with a chronic illness on changes in first-year medical students' levels of patient-centredness. There is existing evidence that medical students' levels of patient-centredness reduce over their student years, and this study will contribute to an understanding of how this reduction can be minimised or reversed.