Interdisciplinary Workshop Boosts Medical Students’ Confidence in Tackling Syphilis and Sexual Health

Syphilis has returned with a vengeance. Once considered a relic of a bygone era, the bacterial infection caused by Treponema pallidum is once again a significant public health problem in many countries, and clinicians on the front lines are often poorly equipped to confront it. The reason is not a lack of laboratory tests or antibiotics, but something far more delicate: the conversation. Diagnosing and treating sexually transmitted infections depends on a doctor’s ability to take a candid, non-judgmental sexual history, yet surveys have repeatedly shown that medical students feel uncomfortable and inadequately prepared to have exactly those conversations. A new study from University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, published in BMC Medical Education, suggests that a carefully designed interdisciplinary workshop can change that picture in a single day.

The research team, led by Ines Heinen and Nina Matthes, who contributed equally to the work, brought together experts from two departments that rarely share a classroom: dermatology and venereology on one side, and medical psychology on the other. Their workshop for medical students combined the hard clinical science of syphilis with the soft skills of stigma-sensitive communication. Thirty-three students participated in the session, and thirty-one of them completed the voluntary surveys that formed the basis of the analysis. The design was a pre-post evaluation, meaning each student rated their own knowledge and confidence immediately before and immediately after the workshop using standardized questionnaires, allowing the researchers to measure change at the level of the individual learner.

On the dermatological side, the curriculum covered the epidemiology of syphilis, its clinical presentation across its stages, diagnostic procedures, and current treatment standards. This technical grounding matters because syphilis is famously called the great imitator: its symptoms can mimic everything from a harmless rash to neurological disease, and a clinician who does not think to ask the right questions may never order the right test. The students also practiced a practical procedural skill that is easy to overlook in lecture-based teaching, namely the administration of an intramuscular injection, which they rehearsed using a model. Because benzathine penicillin, the mainstay of syphilis therapy, is delivered intramuscularly, this hands-on component connected the pharmacology of treatment directly to a skill students will need at the bedside.

The psychological half of the workshop addressed what many educators consider the true bottleneck in STI care: stigma. Students explored how stigmatization affects patients with sexually transmitted infections, engaged in structured self-reflection about their own attitudes and discomforts, and learned the concrete content of a professional sexual history. The centerpiece of this component was a series of role-playing exercises based on fictional patient cases, in which students practiced taking a medical history in a simulated clinical encounter. This format deliberately forced learners to confront the awkwardness of asking intimate questions in a safe environment, where mistakes carry no consequences for real patients but generate immediate feedback and reflection.

The results were striking in their breadth. After the workshop, students reported a significant increase in their self-assessed knowledge of syphilis epidemiology, clinical symptoms, diagnostic procedures, and treatment. Their confidence in administering an intramuscular injection also rose significantly. Just as importantly, the measures targeting communication shifted in the right direction: students reported greater knowledge of what a sexual history should contain, more confidence while actually taking one, and a better understanding of the relevance of stigmatization. These gains were recorded on standardized self-assessment scales, the workhorse of medical education research, which capture a learner’s subjective sense of preparedness, a known predictor of whether a skill will actually be used in practice.

Equally telling were the scores that fell. Students’ self-reported embarrassment while taking a sexual history decreased significantly after the workshop, and so did their concerns that patients might feel stigmatized during such conversations. This dual movement, confidence up and anxiety down, is precisely the pattern educators hope to see, because embarrassment is one of the most commonly cited barriers that keeps young doctors from asking about sexual behavior at all. When a clinician hesitates to ask, the question often goes unasked, the risk factor goes unrecorded, and the infection goes undiagnosed. Reducing that hesitation at the training stage could therefore ripple forward into better case-finding years later.

The study did not rely solely on self-report. After the workshop, students also completed an objective test covering the treatment of syphilis and sexual history taking, providing a check on whether the subjective confidence gains were anchored in actual knowledge. The authors present this combination of subjective and objective measures as a methodological strength, since self-assessed competence can inflate independently of real ability. While the pre-post design without a control group means the researchers cannot rule out effects of simply spending a day in focused study, the consistency of the improvements across knowledge, communication, and attitudinal domains lends credibility to the intervention itself.

Perhaps the most persuasive endorsement came from the participants themselves. Most students stated that the workshop should be integrated into the standard medical curriculum, a notable verdict in a crowded course of study where every additional hour competes with anatomy, pathology, and clinical rotations. The enthusiasm suggests that students perceive the gap the workshop fills, and that they experience the combination of clinical content and communication training as directly relevant to the doctors they are becoming. In an era when curricula are increasingly packed with technical content, a format that students actively want more of is a valuable currency for curriculum reformers.

The broader implications reach beyond syphilis. Sexually transmitted infections remain among the most common infectious diseases worldwide, and public health agencies have documented rising case numbers for years, including congenital syphilis, which can cause severe harm to newborns. Every missed diagnosis begins with a conversation that never happened, and every conversation that never happened often traces back to a clinician who was never trained to have it. The Hamburg team argues that teaching dermatological and psychological content together may prepare students for patient-centered sexual healthcare better than traditional discipline-specific education, in which the biology of infection and the human dynamics of disclosure are taught in separate silos, if the latter is taught at all.

The study, conducted with ethics approval from the local Psychological Ethics Committee at University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf and published open access, is a small one, and the authors are careful about what it can and cannot show. Thirty-one students, one workshop, and self-assessed outcomes do not settle the question of long-term behavior change in clinical practice. But the findings offer a concrete, replicable template: pair the venereology with the psychology, add role-play and procedural practice, and measure what happens. If subsequent studies with larger cohorts and follow-up assessments confirm these results, medical schools may gain a proven answer to a question that has lingered for decades, namely how to turn students who dread asking about sex into clinicians who can do it competently, confidently, and without judgment.

Subject of Research: Medical education interventions for sexually transmitted infection training

Article Title: Enhancing medical students’ self-assessed competence in sexually transmitted infections: outcomes of an interdisciplinary workshop on syphilis, stigmatization and sexual history-taking

Article References: Heinen, I., Matthes, N., Booken, N., Härter, M., Schneider, S. W., & Abeck, F. (2026). Enhancing medical students’ self-assessed competence in sexually transmitted infections: outcomes of an interdisciplinary workshop on syphilis, stigmatization and sexual history-taking. BMC Medical Education. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-026-10507-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12909-026-10507-0

Keywords: syphilis, sexually transmitted infections, medical education, medical students, sexual history-taking, stigmatization, dermatology, medical psychology, workshop, communication skills, Hamburg-Eppendorf, curriculum