Capsule Commentary on Bloom-Feshbach et al., Health Literacy in Transitions of Care: An Innovative Objective Structured Clinical Examination for Fourth Year Medical Students in an Internship Preparation Course

Excerpt

Achieving the Healthy People 2020 goal of health equity in the U.S. will require better training on safe hospital discharges and communication with low-literacy populations.1 ^, 2 Bloom-Feshbach et al. present their experience and data collected from a new residency-readiness curriculum to teach and assess communication skills during a high-risk discharge scenario with a patient with low literacy.3 The vaguely described peer-led workshop emphasized widely taught approaches such as ‘teach-back’,4 and was the basis of behavioral assessment in the single OSCE using trained, non-standardized actors. Interpretation of their findings is limited—of both the “natural experiment’ assessing workshop efficacy and the generalizability and reliability of skill assessment using their non-validated behavioral checklist. Nevertheless, institutions in need of similar curriculum will find value in their novel approach for assessing pre-residency competency in safe discharge communication. …