The effect of communication skills training on the anxiety and stress of Covid-19 among the university students

The covid-19 pandemic has caused a lot of anxiety and stress among all students, especially medical students. Therefore, the current research was conducted with the aim of determining the effect of communication skills training on the anxiety and stress of Covid-19 in students of medical sciences unit.

This was a semi-experimental study with a pre-test-post-test design with a control group. The research population was the students of Islamic Azad University, Medical Sciences branch, Tehran, in the academic year of 2021-2022. The sample of the research was 170 students who were selected by simple random sampling method and replaced randomly using lottery in two groups of 85 people including experimental and control groups. The experimental group received 4 sessions of 90 minutes for a month under communication skills training, and the control group did not receive training during this period and remained on the waiting list for training. The research tools were demographic information form, anxiety inventory and corona stress scale. The data were analyzed with chi-square, independent t tests and univariate analysis of covariance in SPSS-26 software.

The results of chi-square and independent t tests showed that the experimental and control groups did not differ significantly in terms of gender and average age (P>0.05). Also, the findings of the univariate covariance analysis test showed that communication skills training reduced the anxiety and stress of corona in medical students (P<0.001).

The results indicated the effective role of communication skills training in reducing the anxiety and stress of Corona in medical students. Therefore, health professionals can use the communication skills training method along with other effective training methods to improve the psychological characteristics related to Corona