Customizable Curriculum to Enhance Resident Communication Skills

Communication remains challenging to teach and evaluate. We designed an online patient survey to assess anesthesia residents’ communication skills from August 2014 to July 2015. In December 2014, we implemented a customized, simulation-based curriculum. We calculated an overall rating for each survey by averaging the ratings for the individual questions. Based on the Hodges–Lehmann 2-sample aligned rank-sum test, overall ratings, reported as the median (interquartile range) of residents’ average overall ratings, differed significantly between the preintervention (3.86 [3.76–3.94]) and postintervention (3.91 [3.84–3.95]) periods ( P = .025). Future studies should assess the intervention’s effectiveness and generalizability.