The names assigned the components were derived from the content of the items with highest loadings in each component [ 65] and are as follows: Direct Clinical Practice (19 items), Professional Development (5 items), Ethical Decision-Making (11 items), Clinical Leadership (6 items), Cooperation and Consultation (6 items), and Critical Thinking (4 items).
Additionally, we found that clinical condition of seriously ill patients often changed rapidly; the two selected post-consultation items were of very low burden cognitively and emotionally for participants to complete.
The 15 consultation content items (Table 1) were divided into three Content indices: The Somatic Index comprising the two diagnostic items (myomas and anemia) together with the five illness items (numbers 3 – 7).
At the end of each consultation, the items discussed during the consultations will be collected.
Two independent raters scored the videotapes according to this list of consultation content items as zero (not present) or 1 (present) according to whether the student-physician had addressed the specific issue or not in the consultation.
All participating patients or their healthcare proxies complete a brief pre-consultation (18 items) and post-consultation (2 items) interviewer-administered questionnaire.
This study indicates that explicitly incorporating context factors into communication assessment in a protocolized way leads to a significantly lower number of applicable MAAS-Global items per consultation, and to higher item scores.
In 15% of outpatient consultations key items of clinical information were missing.
Box 1 (Fig 1) gives details of the pre-consultation questionnaire items used to define hardcore smoking.
I decided to put off that decision, pending invocation of the "Major Purchases" clause of my marriage, which calls for a spousal consultation on any item with a price tag above $100 unless it's an item that I think the spouse won't approve of buying but I really want anyway.
Refinement of the list of PTSD items following the process of consultation yielded 21 items representing PTSD symptoms in the Melanesian context (see Table 2).
