Dr. Kris Kirschbaum Brings Communication Training to Medical Residents
Dr. Kris Kirschbaum’s road to East Carolina University is slightly off the beaten path; however her career in the healthcare industry helped guide her here. Kirschbaum began her career as an employee in the Medical Student Records within the Student Affairs Office at the University of New Mexico, where she then was promoted to the Program Coordinator for Assessments of Medical Students. Realizing that many medical students were failing the communication portion of their assessments she enrolled herself in a graduate level communication course at UNM, in hopes of bringing skills learned back to the medical students. “I initially thought I could take one course, know it all and bring everything I learned back to the medical students.” Quickly realizing this was not the case, Kirschbaum enrolled fulltime in the University of New Mexico’s masters program and subsequently their doctorate program.
Highly sought after due to her ongoing research and ensuing training programs, she chose ECU in part because of the newly designed master’s program in health communication, as well as the opportunities she could potentially have to expand her research and training programs within the Brody School of Medicine.
Kirschbaum’s research dives into an area of study that not many communication scholars have been. Most communication researchers tend to focus healthcare research on patient-provider communication and interaction, but far too little research has been done studying communication between doctors. Her research takes the Face Negotiation Theory, typically used in the context of separate distinct cultures, and applies it to the health field, distinguishing health and medicine as a culture of their own.
This research has stemmed a successful training program, developed by Kirschbaum, to improve communication between doctors, specifically anesthesiologists and surgeons.
Although a new professor at ECU and having relocated to Greenville, Kirschbaum travels to New Mexico once a week, for one night, in partnership with the attending physicians at the medical school, to conduct a training program for the medical residents. The training program Kirschbaum developed is a seven-week course that merges two separate departments: anesthesiology and surgery and works with them to improve interactions and communication. Typically, the training sessions begin on Tuesday afternoon at one o’clock with four participating residents, two anesthesiologists and two surgeons. They first take a pretest about their attitudes toward face negotiation theory and then Kirschbaum and the attending physicians provide two scenarios for the residents to act out in a simulation center. In the simulation center, the residents essentially operate on a life size mannequin that the attending physicians can manipulate from the control room. In the control room Kirschbaum watches the simulations on a television screen and analyzes their performances. After the first simulation in the training session, which is based on a rhetorical approach to communication, she provides the residents tips to enhance their communication and then they participate in the second simulation, where they can apply what a post-test is given to the residents and Kirschbaum looks to see if their attitudes towards face negotiation have changed. The attending physicians then debrief the residents on how they clinically performed. The simulation interactions are also filmed, which Kirschbaum and her team will use to code for communication competence and rhetorical examples. This allows the research to be a multi-method approach: quantitative and qualitative. This training serves a two-fold purpose; to keep track of resident’s progress and to strengthen their progress by enhancing their communication skills.
Currently Kirschbaum’s research grant is through the University of New Mexico, however she is in the process of applying for a multi-institutional grant that would allow her to expand her study and training to other medical schools. The team at the University of New Mexico has applied for a national grant for this project as well.
For Kris Kirschbaum the road from New Mexico to Greenville, North Carolina is long; however, the 2,000 miles traveled will hopefully expand her research and benefit the medical community at large.
View the entire October 2008 Issue of Exploration & Discovery
