Communication skills of medical students: Evaluation of a new communication curriculum at the University of Augsburg.

Objectives: Teaching communication skills plays a pivotal role in medical curricula. The aim of this article is to describe and evaluate a new communication curriculum developed at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Augsburg (KomCuA), which was conceptualized by an interdisciplinary team based on recommended quality standards (i.e.

Fear of progression in chronic diseases: psychometric properties of the Fear of Progression Questionnaire.

Objective: The aim of this study was the development and psychometric testing of a new psychological questionnaire to measure the fear of progression (FoP) in chronically ill patients (cancer, diabetes mellitus and rheumatic diseases).

Methods: The Fear of Progression Questionnaire (FoP-Q) was developed in four phases: (1) generation of items (65 interviews); (2) reduction of items--the initial version of the questionnaire (87 items) was presented to 411 patients, to construct subscales and test the reliability; (3) testing the convergent and discriminative validity of the reduced test version (43 items) within a new sample (n=439); (4) translation--German to English.

Results: The scale comprised five factors (Cronbach's alpha >.