Teaching Probabilities and Risks to Medical Students With a Special Focus on Communication With Patients

Medical doctors are frequently confronted with various tools for risk assessment, forecast models, and diagnostics based on conditional probabilities, but statistical literacy among medical students is often low. This leads to a potential loss of information when communicating with patients and poorer decision making. We argue that a special focus in teaching probabilities and risks to medical students not only should be on skills regarding the correct interpretation of the different measures from a clinical perspective but also should focus on how to communicate these risks via natural frequencies to patients. We identified some typical settings and small case-studies that illustrate potential solutions that could be used when teaching statistics to medical students, to ensure proper communication with patients.