An approach to the education about, and assessment of, attitudes in undergraduate medical education.
BACKGROUND
Attitudes have been shown to be important determinants of the quality and efficacy of medical care. There is little research on the education about, and assessment of, attitudes in undergraduate medical education.


OBJECTIVE
To describe the design and delivery of an attitude awareness workshop, and the associated objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) station used as the assessment tool.


METHODS
Development, delivery, assessment and evaluation of an attitude awareness workshop were performed.


RESULTS
Data are presented from 144 students. In 1999, the overall mean OSCE score was 62.44% (SD 7.6, n=73). The mean score for the attitude station was 57.97% (SD 12.9). In 2000, these figures were 67.11% (SD 8.3, n=71) and 73.75% (SD 10.8) respectively. In 1998/99, the average mark out of 10 for the educational quality of the attitude workshop was 6.6 and in 1999/00 this rose to 7.8.


CONCLUSIONS
Development of both an educational and assessment programme concerning attitudes appears feasible.
Kelly
M E
ME
Department of General Practice, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland. maureen.kelly@nuigalway.ie
Fenlon
N P
NP
Murphy
A W
AW
D001291:Attitude of Health Personnel; D003142:Communication; D004504:Education, Medical, Undergraduate; D006801:Humans; D010817:Physician-Patient Relations; D013337:Students, Medical / Q000523:psychology*