Using video-taped examples of standardized patient to teach medical students taking informed consent

Introduction: Medical student should be trained in medicalethics and one of the most essential issues in this field is takinginformed consents. In this research, we compared the effect ofeffectiveness of teaching methods on students’ ability in takinginformed consent from patients.Methods: This semi-experimental study was carried out on fiftyeight subjects from the 4th-year students of Shiraz University ofMedical Sciences who attended in medical ethics course beforetheir ‘clinical clerkship’training.Method of sampling was censusand students were randomly allocated into two groups of controlgroup (n=28) was trained in traditional lecture-based class andthe case groupnamed as A1 (n=22) were taught by video-tapedexamples of standardized patient.Then A1 group attended intraditional lecture-based classes named as A2. The groups wereevaluated in terms the ability of recognition of ethical issuesthrough the scenario based ethical examination before and aftereach training. Scenarios were related to the topics of informedconsent. Data were analyzed by SPSS 14 software using descriptivestatistics and anova test. P value less than 0.05 was considered assignificant.Results: The mean scores results of A2, A1 and B group werefound to be 7.21, 5.91 and 5.73 out of 8, respectively. Comparisonbetween the groups demonstrated that the ability of takinginformed consent was significantly higher in A2 group (p<0.001),followed by A1 group (p<0.05), while was the least in the B group(p=0.875).Conclusion: According to this research, lecture-based teaching isstill of great value in teaching medical ethics, but when combinedwith standardized patient, the outcome will be much better. Itshould be considered that mixed methods of teaching should beused together for better result.Keywords: Standardized patient; Medical ethics; Informed consent