Training students from rehabilitation professions on communicating with patients with communication disorders.

Background: FRAME, a mnemonic referring to a program for helping health care providers adapt patient-provider communication when working with patients with communication disorders, improves the knowledge, confidence, and communication skills of medical students for working with this population. However, the impact of the FRAME program for preparing students from the rehabilitation disciplines to work with patients with communication disorders is unknown.

Objective: To examine the effects of the FRAME program on the knowledge, confidence, and communication skills of students in physical therapy (PT), occupational therapy (OT), and prosthetics and orthotics (P&O) in terms of how to communicate effectively with patients with communication disorders.

Design: An exploratory, quasi-experimental pretest-posttest design.

Setting: PT, OT, and P&O clinical education programs at the University of Washington's Department of Rehabilitation Medicine.

Participants: Twenty rehabilitation students (PT = 12; OT = 7; and P&O = 1) participated in the FRAME training.

Interventions: The FRAME program, delivered in a single, 2-hour session teaches students communication skills to use with patients with various types of communication disorders.

Main Outcome Measures: A quiz of students' knowledge about communication disorders and a self-rating of confidence for interacting with this patient population were used. Speech-language pathology graduate clinicians rated students' use of communication strategies from each area of the FRAME training during interactions with standardized patients portraying aphasia and dysarthria. Student qualitative feedback were also collected.

Results: Students' knowledge, confidence, and use of communication strategies improved significantly following training. Greatest gains were observed in students' ability to familiarize themselves with how a patient communicates and establish a method of communication before proceeding with the interview. Qualitative feedback aligned with these findings.

Conclusions: The FRAME program increases the knowledge, confidence, and use of communication strategies in rehabilitation students in order to communicate more effectively with patients with communication disorders in their future careers.