Impact of Short-term Patient Education Intervention on the Teaching Skills of Physical Therapy Students: a Randomized Controlled Trial

Abstract Background: Patient education is an important aspect of physiotherapy. Effective education is based on quality communication and understanding of patients' needs. For a successful practice, it is necessary to recognize the factors that affect the ability to teach the patient and prepare new physiotherapists for this task. The research aims to determine the effect of training on the self-efficacy and skills of physiotherapy students in patient education. Methods: Students in the final year of physiotherapy were randomized into an intervention group (52 students) and a control group (51 students). The intervention group participated in 2.5 hours of lectures, discussions, simulated exercises with colleagues, and video examples of patient education. The control group had subsequent training. All students performed a self-assessment of their teaching abilities. Patient education was assessed by a blinded evaluator using the Objective Structured Clinical Examination from an audio-recorded simulated clinical practice task. Results: The results show no differences in demographic variables, while a significant improvement was achieved for the intervention group after the training. The intervention group before the experiment did not perform differently than the control group on self-efficacy items (p>.05), but they did perform significantly better than the control group after the experiment (p<.001). The intervention group showed better results than the control group in almost all observed fields. Conclusion: These findings suggest that the intervention positively increased the educational skills of physiotherapy students.