The Role of Verbal Feedback in Surgical Education

Finding common ground: meta-synthesis of communication frameworks found in patient communication, supervision and simulation literature

BACKGROUND

Effective communication between patients-clinicians, supervisors-learners and facilitators-participants within a simulation is a key priority in health profession education. There is a plethora of frameworks and recommendations to guide communication in each of these contexts, and they represent separate discourses with separate communities of practice and literature. Finding common ground within these frameworks has the potential to minimise cognitive load and maximise efficiency, which presents an opportunity to consolidate messages, strategies and skills throughout a communication curriculum and the possibility of expanding the research agenda regarding communication, feedback and debriefing in productive ways.

METHODS

A meta-synthesis of the feedback, debriefing and clinical communication literature was conducted to achieve these objectives.

RESULTS

Our analysis revealed that the concepts underlying the framework can be usefully categorised as stages, goals, strategies, micro-skills and meta-skills. Guidelines for conversations typically shared a common structure, and strategies aligned with a stage. Core transferrable communication skills (i.e., micro-skills) were identified across various types of conversation, and the major differences between frameworks were related to the way that power was distributed in the conversation and the evolution of conversations along the along the path of redistributing power. As part of the synthesis, an overarching framework "prepare-EMPOWER enact" was developed to capture these shared principles across discourses.

CONCLUSIONS

Adopting frameworks for work-based communication that promote dialogue and empower individuals to contribute may represent an important step towards learner-centred education and person-centred care for patients.

Challenging feedback myths: Values, learner involvement and promoting effects beyond the immediate task

CONTEXT

Research suggests that feedback in the health professions is less useful than we would like. In this paper, we argue that feedback has become reliant on myths that perpetuate unproductive rituals. Feedback often resembles a discrete episode of an educator "telling," rather than an active and iterative involvement of the learner in a future-facing process. With this orientation towards past events, it is not surprising that learners become defensive or disengaged when they are reminded of their deficits.

METHODS

We tackle three myths of feedback: (a) feedback needs praise-criticism balancing rules; (b) feedback is a skill residing within the teacher; and (c) feedback is an input only. For each myth we provide a reframing with supporting examples from the literature.

CONCLUSIONS

Equipping learners to engage in feedback processes may reduce the emotional burden on both parties, rendering techniques such as the feedback sandwich redundant. We also highlight the benefits for learners and teachers of conceptualising feedback as a relational activity, and of tracing the effects of information exchanges. These effects may be immediate or latent, and may manifest in different forms such as changes in learner evaluative judgement or professional identity.