Designing and Psychometric Assessing of Physician-Patient Communication Skills Tool

Assessment of physicians’ communication skills with patients is essential to ensure effective treatment. Achieving such a goal requires the use of a valid, native, and culturally-based tool. This study aimed to design a physician-patient communication skills assessment tool and evaluate its validity and reliability among the medical students of Guilan University of Medical Sciences, Rasht City, Iran.

In this cross-sectional, descriptive, and analytical study, out of 400 medical students (interns), 300 were selected by a stratified random sampling method. The initial tool with 30 items was evaluated by calculating the item impact index in the target group. Also, its ratio and content validity indexes were assessed by 10 experts’ views and factor analysis. The reliability of the research tool was confirmed by assessing the internal consistency by calculating the Cronbach alpha value. 

Out of the 30 initial items, after calculating the item impact score index of higher than 1.5, the content validity ratio greater than 0.51, the content validity index higher than 0.79, and exploratory factor analysis,18 items remained and were considered suitable for the physician-patient communication skills assessment tool. Then, these variables were loaded considering the amount of special value greater than 1 under four factors. The reliability of the research tool was confirmed by calculating the Cronbach alpha coefficient of 0.92. The instrument was also confirmed by confirmatory factor analysis regarding its appropriate fitness indices. This study provided a proper and native instrument with 18 valid and reliable items for the assessment of physician-patient communication skills in medical students. 

The results of this study could be of interest to researchers in evaluating physician-patient communication skills in other medical sciences universities of Iran.