Osher Collaborative Education Small Grants

Crowd-sourcing innovative ideas to create and implement professional education projects to benefit the Osher Collaborative for Integrative Health

Enhancing Education in Interpersonal Communication Using a Validated Tool

Project Idea Status: 

Health professional education is rapidly changing with online learning and AI. Nonetheless, the foundation of healing rests on core skills in interpersonal communication that create a sacred space while also empowering patients. Assessment of these core skills are too often assessed subjectively without validated instruments. We proposed to iterate an already-validated health coaching assessment tool that has observable anchors for numerous competencies in interpersonal education. Strong inter-rater reliability exists among faculty within a single program and a new iteration is needed to expand use of the tool. Three Osher Collaborative coach training programs will jointly improve this evidence-based tool to be able to deliver actionable feedback for learners across different training models. Once finalized, the tool will be paired with comprehensive training content to facilitate implementation across other interested programs. In a later project, separate components of the tool can be validated to assess interpersonal communication across multiple healthcare professionals.