Assessing“Breaking Bad News” Communication Competency in Midwifery Students
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The communication task of conveying difficult news to patients by health care providers, described in the literature as “breaking bad news,” is one that is often performed poorly. There is, at the same time, a relatively small amount of research in the health sciences education literature devoted to the assessment of this particular competency. Like other health care providers, registered midwives in Canada are expected to have knowledge and skill in this domain of communication. In the Ontario Midwifery Education Program, senior students are expected to develop competence in managing situations involving loss during the childbearing year; however, there is little guidance for preceptors with respect to the assessment of performance for this skill. This article reviews the relevant literature on the assessment of “breaking bad news” and workplace assessment tools in health education, and proposes the use of a clinical encounter card that uses a modified Breaking Bad News Assessment Scale to assist and guide preceptors. Further investigation of the tool’s reliability, validity, and acceptability to preceptors is needed. This article has been peer reviewed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".