Zeitschrift für Hochschuldidaktik Nr. 1998/4
Medicine Study 2000
Alternatives for Learning and Assessment, Teaching and Evaluation
Basic skills training using dummies - Do clinically experienced students also profit from it?
Michael Schmidts, Henriette Beran, Martin Lischka (Vienna, Austria)
Summary
Purpose: In order to prepare medical students for their clerkships, our medical education unit offers a one-week voluntary course during which students are trained in basic clinical skills using dummies (skills lab). Surprisingly, one out of four students taking part in our training course has had previous clerkship experience. Do these "experienced" students profit from our program at all?
Methods: At the beginning (n=92) and the end (n=87) of the course the students completed a questionnaire in which they were asked to rate their abilities in the 15 basic clinical skills covered in our program. In the second questionnaire they were also asked to evaluate the course as a learning tool for each skill taught. Additionally, a three station osce (objective structured clinical examination) was performed. In particular, we looked for differences in respect to students' previous clinical experience.
Results: For all trained skills we found a significant rise in students' self assessment of competency between the beginning and end of the course. Final self assessments were very high. The validity of these self assessments was confirmed by the results of our osce, which also revealed good trainee performance. Students' ratings of the course as a learning tool also showed high acceptance. For most of these findings no difference between students with clerkship experience and their inexperienced colleagues could be found. An exception was the self assessment of competency at the beginning of the course, where the clerkship group rated their abilities slightly higher for ten of the15 basic skills. Nevertheless the learning gain within this group (calculated as the increase in self-estimated competency between course start and end) was also impressive.
Conclusions: Clinically "experienced" students also seem to profit fundamentally from systematic skills training. Clerkship experience at Austrian hospitals probably does not guarantee competency in basic clinical skills, a reason for this might be a lack of structured teaching.
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