POSTER

Structured Communication Adolescent Guide (SCAG): Extension of reliability and validity to physicians.

Blake K, Kutcher M, Mann K, Murphy J, Wakefield S, Vincent N.
Division of Medical Education, Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Background: The Structured Communication Adolescent Guide (SCAG) was developed to facilitate standardized patient (SP) feedback to medical students on their interviewing ability with adolescents. We previously reported the reliability and validity of the SCAG as a scoring guide for medical students' adolescent interviewing skills.
Purpose: To explore reliability and validity of the SCAG for physicians in practice and residents. Method: Two adolescents (age 15) were trained as SPs and participated in eighteen videotaped interviews conducted by physicians and residents. The adolescents used the SCAG to score the interviews immediately and re-scored a videotape of the same interviews one month later. Another adolescent and a gold-standard rater also scored the same interviews independently.
Results: The SCAG scores produced immediately following the interview were highly correlated with scores one month later (r_i = .91), those from the other adolescent (r_i = .86), and gold standard scores (r_i = .87).
Conclusion: The SCAG can be reliably used with physicians of all levels of training. The SCAG can be used reliably by adolescents to score an interview either immediately following an encounter or on videotape one month later. Further studies will involve using the SCAG and a videotaped encounter with a large number of untrained adolescents at local schools.