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OBJECTIVES: To determine common themes in faculty and peer feedback for emergency medicine (EM) resident oral presentations. METHODS: From January to July 2005, all EM residents received written feedback on communication skills from two faculty and two peer reviewers. The feedback forms were analyzed by using formal grounded theory. The two investigators independently reviewed 25% of the forms to generate a code of general categories and specific qualifiers. The independent codes were merged by consensus into a common code. All forms were independently coded by the two investigators using the common code. Coding disagreements were resolved by consensus, yielding a uniform inventory of feedback categories and qualifiers. RESULTS: Twenty-one of 23 residents participated. Three hundred seventy-two data points were coded, with an interrater agreement of 85.7%. The five most common feedback themes were as follows: focus on key and relevant teaching points; increase audience participation; encourage higher level thinking; decrease content per slide; and add missing content relevant to teaching point. Peers differed from faculty, mentioning more frequently encourage higher level thinking and add missing content relevant to teaching point. Faculty differed from peers, mentioning increase clarity of teaching point and be engaging and enthusiastic more frequently. The difference in distribution of themes between faculty and peers was significant (chi2 = 59.692; p = 0.01). CONCLUSIONS: The authors present a model for providing feedback to EM residents on communication skills that is individualized, behavior based, and includes peer comments. Faculty and peers differ in their recommendations. The findings may inform communication skills curricula for EM residents.

Communication↗

PubMed2006

Different concepts of risk -- a challenge for risk communication.

Although communication belongs to the everyday activities of humans, there is no common understanding of what communication means. Several concepts of communication developed in the communication sciences are described and analyzed in their consequence for the communication about risk. It is shown that successful communication has a set of requirements: a common set of signs and symbols and common moral understandings, experiences, and values. This is a fundamental problem of risk communication because research on risk perception has shown that the understanding of the term 'risk' varies substantially between lay people and scientific experts. While the scientific risk concept is evidence-based and focused, the public addresses uncertainty and a wider range of potential problems. Accordingly, risk communication has to address a wider range of topics, not only factual evidence and probabilities, but also the problem of the definition of expected negative outcomes and the evaluation of these outcomes. Not only the problem of how to define risks plays a major role in risk communication, but also institutional performance, expertise, and experience - gaining institutional trust is one of major challenges of risk communication. As a consequence, the understanding of risk communication, where experts inform the public about risks, has a high risk to fail. Modern concepts of risk communication propose a different conceptualization of the problem: Risk communication is not a task where bits of information are transported from the sender to the recipient of the communication but a process, where both sender and recipient interact in order to develop a common frame for the understanding of the problem.

Communication↗