Can teaching agenda-setting skills to physicians improve clinical interaction quality?
A controlled intervention. BMC Med Educ. 2008;8:3 Authors: Rodriguez HP, Anastario MP, Frankel RM, Odigie EG, Rogers WH, von Glahn T, Safran DG BACKGROUND: Physicians and medical educators have repeatedly acknowledged the inadequacy of communication skills training in the medical school curriculum and opportunities to improve these skills in practice. This study of a controlled intervention evaluates the effect of teaching practicing physicians the skill of “agenda-setting” on patients’ experiences with care. The agenda-setting intervention aimed to engage clinicians in the practice of initiating patient encounters by eliciting the full set of concerns from the patient’s perspective and using that information to prioritize and negotiate which clinical issues should most appropriately be dealt with and which (if any) should be deferred to a subsequent visit. METHODS: Ten physicians from a large physician organization in California with baseline patient survey scores below the statewide
