The effects of simulated patient training on senior dental student's confidence and skills in delivering a tobacco cessation counseling program in School of Dentistry, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, 2010-2011

Simulated patients are highly effective in the medical education and are potentially useful to present tobacco cessation counseling. Although, some studies have reported the advantages of this method in TCC, different aspects of it did not clarified yet. The present study assessed the effects of training by the standardized patients on the confidence and skills of dental students in Shahid Beheshti Medical Sciences University to provide TCC on 2010-2011.

In this controlled non randomized trial, 28 students of semester 11 (controls) and 39 students of semester 12 (cases) were selected and their confidence and skills in providing TCC were determined using a questionnaire. Case students received training by means of standardized patients and TCC was presented according to WHO guidelines of 5A’s & 5R’s. Finally, confidence and TCC skills of the students were assessed using the same measures. The changes occurred in the confidence and TCC skills of both groups were statistically analyzed using student t and ANCOVA tests.

The mean skills scores of the case participants were 5.10 and 13.05 before and after training while the values were 5.14 and 5.25 for the controls. Furthermore, the mean confidence scores were 43.19and 47.13 for the cases with the means of 43.75 and 43.32 for the control participants before and after the training. Significant differences were noted between two groups regarding the increased confidence (p<0.001) and skills scores (p<0.001) while ANCOVA test showed training via standardized patients significantly affected the final confidence and skills of the participants after adjustment for age, gender, marriage status and the primary confidence and skills (both: p<0.001).

According to the results, TCC training via standardized patients improved the dental students’ confidence and skills as compared to the control participants.