Background: Effective physician communication at the end-of-life is a cornerstone to providing patient-centered palliative care. Educational programs in physician communication often rely on self-assessments of physician knowledge and attitudes and seldom provide patients' reports. Thus, it is unclear whether physician self-assessments are associated with patient perspectives.
Objective: To determine whether physician trainees' self-assessments of their communication skills in religious/spiritual discussions were associated with assessments obtained from patients under their care.
Design: Prospective, observational, survey-based study of internal medicine trainees' self-assessments matched with their patients' reports. Data were obtained from preintervention surveys prior to the trainees participating in a communication educational intervention.
Setting and subjects: The study took place at two internal medicine training programs, one in the southeastern United States and one in the northwestern United States. Our subjects were 181 physician trainees in internal medicine and 541 patients with advanced medical illnesses under their care.
Measurements: The outcomes were patient reports of the occurrence of religious/spiritual communication and patient ratings of the quality of this communication. The primary predictor of interest was trainees' preintervention self-assessments of their competency in religious/spiritual communication.
Results: Using multiple variable and path analysis we found that trainees' self-assessments of their communication skills in religious/spiritual communication was significantly and positively associated with their patients' reports of the occurrence and ratings of religious/spiritual communication.
Conclusions: Physician trainee self-assessments may be a valid surrogate for patient ratings of quality with respect to religious/spiritual communication. This specific domain of physician-patient communication should receive further investigation as our finding contrasts with reports of more general measures of physician-patient end-of-life communication.
Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT00687349.