RESEARCH ARTICLE
Innovative Training with Virtual Patients in Transcultural Psychiatry: The Impact on Resident Psychiatrists’ Confidence Ioannis Pantziaras1*, Uno Fors2, Solvig Ekblad1 1 Cultural Medicine Unit, Department of Learning, Informatics, Management and Ethics (LIME), Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden, 2 Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden * [email protected]
Abstract Background OPEN ACCESS Citation: Pantziaras I, Fors U, Ekblad S (2015) Innovative Training with Virtual Patients in Transcultural Psychiatry: The Impact on Resident Psychiatrists’ Confidence. PLoS ONE 10(3): e0119754. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0119754 Academic Editor: Stefano Federici, University of Perugia, ITALY
Virtual patients are now widely accepted as efficient and safe training tools in medical education, but very little is known about their implementation in psychiatry, especially in transcultural clinical care of traumatized refugee patients.
Objective This study aimed at assessing the impact of training with a virtual patient on confidence in providing clinical care for traumatized refugee patients.
Received: July 5, 2014 Accepted: February 3, 2015 Published: March 20, 2015 Copyright: © 2015 Pantziaras et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: Due to the nature of our data (study involving human participants) and in order to protect study participants' privacy according to ethical research standards, our data (coded and unidentified) are available upon request in order to protect the study participants' privacy. Requests should be submitted to Solvig Ekblad (project leader) at [email protected] or Mats Gustavsson (Legal counsel, University Administration, UF) at Mats. [email protected]. Funding: All the funding of this study was by PRIMA Barn och Vuxenpsykiatri AB and the National Board of Health and Welfare (www.socialstyrelsen.se). Title
Methods The authors developed an educational tool based on virtual patient methodology portraying the case of “Mrs. K”, a traumatized refugee woman with symptoms of PTSD and depression. A group (N=32) of resident psychiatrists tested the system and their confidence in different aspects of providing clinical care for this patient group was evaluated pre- and posttest by using a validated confidence questionnaire. Cronbach’s α was calculated for all clusters. Changes between pre- and post-test were compared by using the matched-pair t-test, binomial distribution for exact significance test and a calculation of effect sizes (Cohen’s d).
Results A statistically significant improvement was exhibited in overall confidence (mean Δ: 0.34; p
Innovative Training with Virtual Patients in Transcultural Psychiatry: The Impact on Resident Psychiatrists’ Confidence Ioannis Pantziaras1*, Uno Fors2, Solvig Ekblad1 1 Cultural Medicine Unit, Department of Learning, Informatics, Management and Ethics (LIME), Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden, 2 Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden * [email protected]
Abstract Background OPEN ACCESS Citation: Pantziaras I, Fors U, Ekblad S (2015) Innovative Training with Virtual Patients in Transcultural Psychiatry: The Impact on Resident Psychiatrists’ Confidence. PLoS ONE 10(3): e0119754. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0119754 Academic Editor: Stefano Federici, University of Perugia, ITALY
Virtual patients are now widely accepted as efficient and safe training tools in medical education, but very little is known about their implementation in psychiatry, especially in transcultural clinical care of traumatized refugee patients.
Objective This study aimed at assessing the impact of training with a virtual patient on confidence in providing clinical care for traumatized refugee patients.
Received: July 5, 2014 Accepted: February 3, 2015 Published: March 20, 2015 Copyright: © 2015 Pantziaras et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: Due to the nature of our data (study involving human participants) and in order to protect study participants' privacy according to ethical research standards, our data (coded and unidentified) are available upon request in order to protect the study participants' privacy. Requests should be submitted to Solvig Ekblad (project leader) at [email protected] or Mats Gustavsson (Legal counsel, University Administration, UF) at Mats. [email protected]. Funding: All the funding of this study was by PRIMA Barn och Vuxenpsykiatri AB and the National Board of Health and Welfare (www.socialstyrelsen.se). Title
Methods The authors developed an educational tool based on virtual patient methodology portraying the case of “Mrs. K”, a traumatized refugee woman with symptoms of PTSD and depression. A group (N=32) of resident psychiatrists tested the system and their confidence in different aspects of providing clinical care for this patient group was evaluated pre- and posttest by using a validated confidence questionnaire. Cronbach’s α was calculated for all clusters. Changes between pre- and post-test were compared by using the matched-pair t-test, binomial distribution for exact significance test and a calculation of effect sizes (Cohen’s d).
Results A statistically significant improvement was exhibited in overall confidence (mean Δ: 0.34; p
