Abstract

1. Clinical interview and communication skills are crucial for psychiatry, and these can only be learnt via active experiential learning.
2. These skills, however, are not exclusively owned by psychiatrists. Theatre training also share a lot of components of these soft skills.
3. This project aims (1) to develop a program to train professional actors to play the role of simulated psychiatric patients and to give feedback to interview performance of students ; and (2) to test run and evaluate a novel method that use one-on-one online training session with these trained actors to enhance student’s clinical soft skills.
4. Involving students’ participation in evaluating and refining this pilot program is a key component of this project.
5. This program is expected to compliment conventional clinical skill teaching when normal clinical attachment is in place. However, in case of a resurgence of COVID, this program could be the best alternative to real clinical exposure.