The aim was to design and run a communication skills simulation session for psychiatry trainees with the following learning objectives. 1) Exposing trainees to challenging clinical scenarios to increase their confidence in dealing with these. 2) Improving communication skills of trainees in dealing with anxious, psychotic, disinhibited or non-engaging patients. The facilitation of the session would be done by two medical doctors working alongside a communication skills coach (CSC).

Trainees were informed of these optional sessions via email. The majority of those who attended were core trainees, specialty doctors and foundation year doctors.

The session was around 3 hours in length. Trainees began by completing a questionnaire which rated their confidence in several domains including when dealing with patients that are anxious, psychotic and disinhibited. This would be repeated at the end of the session to allow for comparison.

Trainees were provided with background information for each scenario and were also given a task such as performing a brief risk assessment. The scenarios lasted 10 minutes and involved 1 trainee and 1 professional actor. A 15 minute debrief would then follow. This would cover what went well, what could be improved and feedback from the actor. The CSC would then provide detailed personalised feedback covering both verbal and non-verbal communication. 6 scenarios took place over the session.

The session was run 5 times in total. The first 4 sessions were held virtually (Zoom) and a total of 29 trainees attended these. The 5th session was held face to face at the Experiential Learning Centre and 5 trainees attended. 25 of the total 34 attendees completed both questionnaires.

In all 5 sessions there was noted to be an increase in confidence ratings when comparing pre and post session scores. Trainees had been asked to rate themselves out of 10. Average increases of 1.8 (anxious), 1.6 (psychotic) and 2 (disinhibited) were noted. An average increase of 1.3 was noted when dealing with an angry/upset relative.

Trainees had rated the debrief process as 4.6 (scored from 1 to 5) and had given an overall rating of 8.8 (scored from 1 to 10) for the entire session. Oral and written feedback from trainees praised the input from all facilitators, especially the CSC.

We feel that the addition of a CSC enhanced our medical simulation training significantly. We hope that others may be inspired to trial something similar in their teaching.