["STeP" ("Students Teaching Patients"): Medical Students Following up on Informed Consent Discussions. Results of a Methodological Change and Further Considerations].

Background: Literature shows an increasing number of reports on the incompleteness of informed consent discussions held by residents. Residents feel insecure and not adequately prepared for this task. This project aimed to integrate supervised informed consent discussions into the medical curriculum, working with "real" patients instead of other students or actors. Method: "STeP" ("Students Teaching Patients") is a teaching format which has been recently introduced at the University of Magdeburg. Initially, a certified physician prepares medical students for taking informed consent. Using standard questionnaires, students interview patients who have given consent, following up on what patients recall from the informed consent discussion. Afterwards the results are reported to the physician, who then checks back with the patient that there are no new or unanswered questions. In this part of the project, the original process was changed in that a group of patients was interviewed twice to evaluate whether students were able to increase patients' knowledge. Results: Although all students taking part in this study had already completed the surgery course, they were not sufficiently aware of the most relevant complications of laparoscopic cholecystectomy. Also it was difficult for informed patients to render the consequences and complications resulting from such a procedure. Randomly chosen patients recalled only one possible complication on average, although they had signed the informed consent form. Most of them could not explain the effects of a lesion of the bile duct. Although those patients who had been interviewed twice recalled more complications than those who had been interviewed only once, patients generally did not like to be interviewed twice, which caused us to discontinue this part of the project. Conclusions: Based on the analysis of the limitations of this method of repeated interviews, we now plan to perform STeP as a "student consultation" before the physician takes informed consent, with students reflecting their own consultation. Increase in knowledge and patient satisfaction will be measured postoperatively by the students. The results of this project are pending.