Reliability Testing of a Communication Skills Teaching Video

Background and Purpose: It is important to cultivate clinical teachers' communication skills in a domestic clinical teaching environment, which can be achieved using a reliable teaching video. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to develop and test the reliability of a domestic communication skills teaching video. Methods: A two-phase development study was conducted in a medical center in 2010 and 2011. In phase I the communication skills teaching video was created, while in phase II a pilot study of the video was carried out. The participants were 47 third year resident physicians, and the evaluation tool was a communication process skills instrument (CPSI). Two reliability tests were used: (1) Internal consistency reliability was tested using Cronbach’s α value and (2) inter-rater reliability was tested using the intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC). Results: The Cronbach's α value of a 28-item CPSI used by the resident physicians was 0.99 (p＜0.05). The overall ICC of the 28 items was 0.94 (p＜0.05), with subscales ranging from 0.75~0.94 (p＜0.05). Conclusion: This preliminary study was conducted to determine the acceptable reliability of a communication skills teaching video. The video described in this study could provide clinical educators with a valuable tool for training and evaluating clinical teachers objectively.