Reviewers
Authors
Adult Medical Oncology, King Abdulaziz Medical City, National Guard Health Affair, Saudi Arabia
Abstract
In recent years, medical guidelines for communicating bad news to patients have been
published. Training for this task was included in the curricula of undergraduate medical
courses, specialization, and continuing medical education. The objective of this review is
to evaluate the existing evidence in the literature on the effectiveness of such training. Only
seven controlled trials were found, four of which were randomized, and these four indicate
an improvement in the trainees. These findings suggest that training undergraduate and
postgraduate doctors in skills for communicating bad news may be beneficial but there are
important limitations to reach a definitive conclusion. These limitations are discussed in this
article.
Keywords
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