Dental Students’ Self-evaluation of Communication Skills using an online competency assessment tool

Objectives: To assess the final year (semester 9) dental students’ self-rating of their communication skills (CS) against the expected rating for CS domain using an online tool on Expected Progressive Clinical Competencies.
Methods: An online tool was developed to capture dental students’ self-rating of their competencies against an expected rating as per the dental-programme outcomes. The tool comprised of 77 items grouped under 7 domains; communication skills (6 items), procedural skills ( 27 items) , patient’s safety (17 items), disease prevention and health promotion (5 items), professionalism and ethics (8 items) , critical thinking and research (10 items) and data interpretation for investigations (4 items).
The scope of this study is to report the final year dental students’ self-rating against the expected competencies under the CS domain. The domain comprised of 6 items of 5 points Likert scale ranging from 1 (knows about the skill) to 5 (I feel confident in performing the skill on real patients/ in real practice).
Results: Results: 17 out of 23 students responded to the online tool (74% response rate).
The final year dental students rated themselves as competent meeting the expected level of competency in relation to this domain with a total mean score of 4.7. The item scores were an average of 4.8 -Building rapport with patients in order to facilitate effective delivery of dental care, 4.8 -ability to gather information appropriately to obtain history of patients; 4.7 - ability to identify patient’s expectations, desires, needs and attitudes with regards to dental treatment; 4.6 - ability to communicate professional information to patients to assist their decision on selection of treatment options; 4.6 - ability to communicate professional information and knowledge to both patients and other professionals in both verbal and written forms and 4.8 - ability to give information on dental health education.
Conclusions: Generally the final-year dental students’ self-evaluation met the expected competency levels in relation to the communication skills domain.