• Yuya Hagiwara, Jennifer Healy, Shuko Lee, Jeanette Ross, Dixie Fischer, and Sandra Sanchez-Reilly.
• Division of General Internal Medicine, Department of Medicine, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, USA. Electronic address: yuya-hagiwara@uiowa.edu.
• J Pain Symptom Manage. 2018 Jan 1; 55 (1): 89-93.

ContextA cornerstone procedure in Palliative Medicine is to perform family meetings. Learning how to lead a family meeting is an important skill for physicians and others who care for patients with serious illnesses and their families. There is limited evidence on how to assess best practice behaviors during end-of-life family meetings.ObjectivesOur aim was to develop and validate an observational tool to assess trainees' ability to lead a simulated end-of-life family meeting.MethodsBuilding on evidence from published studies and accrediting agency guidelines, an expert panel at our institution developed the Family Meeting Assessment Tool. All fourth-year medical students (MS4) and eight geriatric and palliative medicine fellows (GPFs) were invited to participate in a Family Meeting Objective Structured Clinical Examination, where each trainee assumed the physician role leading a complex family meeting. Two evaluators observed and rated randomly chosen students' performances using the Family Meeting Assessment Tool during the examination. Inter-rater reliability was measured using percent agreement. Internal consistency was measured using Cronbach α.ResultsA total of 141 trainees (MS4 = 133 and GPF = 8) and 26 interdisciplinary evaluators participated in the study. Internal reliability (Cronbach α) of the tool was 0.85. Number of trainees rated by two evaluators was 210 (MS4 = 202 and GPF = 8). Rater agreement was 84%. Composite scores, on average, were significantly higher for fellows than for medical students (P < 0.001).ConclusionExpert-based content, high inter-rater reliability, good internal consistency, and ability to predict educational level provided initial evidence for construct validity for this novel assessment tool.Copyright © 2017 American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine. All rights reserved.

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