Effects of clinical simulation-based teaching on communication and clinical decision-making skills among medical students: A systematic review
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33448/rsd-v15i5.51075Keywords:
Simulation training, Education, Medical, Students, Medical, Communication, Clinical competence, Systematic review.Abstract
Current medical education increasingly requires teaching approaches that strengthen essential non-technical competencies, particularly communication and clinical decision-making skills. In this context, clinical simulation-based teaching has been consolidated as a relevant active methodology in medical education. This review investigated how simulation-based teaching influences communication and clinical decision-making skills among medical students. The review was organized in accordance with the PRISMA 2020 reporting framework. Searches were carried out in PubMed/MEDLINE, Scopus, and SciELO using terms associated with medical students, simulation-based education, communication, and decision-making. Initially, 124 potentially relevant records were identified. After removing 29 duplicates and applying eligibility criteria, 8 studies were included in the qualitative synthesis. The selected studies, published between 2017 and 2025, included different simulation modalities, such as standardized patients, multimodal scenarios, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence-based systems. Taken together, the included studies indicated improvements in communication performance, student confidence, readiness for complex clinical encounters, and clinical reasoning within simulated learning settings. Clinical communication was the most frequently benefited outcome, while clinical decision-making showed favorable results in specific studies. It is concluded that clinical simulation-based teaching is an effective and promising strategy for contemporary medical training and should be more broadly incorporated into undergraduate curricula. However, further multicenter and methodologically robust studies are recommended to strengthen the available scientific evidence.
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