TITLE: EVALUATION OF A CLINICAL SKILLS COURSE TAUGHT BY ANESTHESIOLOGISTS

AUTHORS: Peggy A. Seidman, MD, Robert E. Johnstone, MD
AFFILIATION: West Virginia Univ., Morgantown, WV.

INTRODUCTION: Our academic university department teaches a unique required clinical skills course to second year medical students. The course covers 4 basic procedures identified as essential skills for clinical rotations. Faculties teach the didactic component and supervise actual practice of these skills. Historically, 3rd year medical students start clinical rotations without receiving formal education in these essential skills. Students are taught these procedures by residents during clinical rotations. The resultant experience varies in content, quality and timing. Our course is designed to unify this education.
METHODS: The skills taught are 1) Basic Airway management 2) Invasive Monitoring 3) Lumbar Puncture 4) IV placement. Each skill station has a student:teacher ratio of 5:1 or less. Mannequins and the Human Patient Simulator are used for stations 1, 2,and 3. The students place IV's in each other. The 88- student class is divided into 4 groups who rotate through all 4 stations during the course of the 8-hour day. The class, a required unit in the introduction to Clinical Medicine Curriculum (ICM), is taught on a Saturday. All faculty and resident anesthesiologists, even those with clinical responsibilities, are available to teach. A spring date is chosen to be close to the start of third year clinical rotations. The students receive a course evaluation as part of the required post course test. This study reports the results of the 1999 student evaluations.
RESULTS: 100% of the students completed the evaluation. The response was overwhelmingly positive. The students scored the class a mean value of 4.22/5 for relevancy and 3.72/5 for meeting expectations. In addition, 50 students wrote suggestions for improvement for future courses. The majority of proposed changes related to efficient time utilization.
DISCUSSION: Integration of academic anesthesiology depart- ments in medical curriculum is extremely varied. Frequently exposure of students to anesthesia faculty and clinical skills doesn't occur until the fourth year of study, if at all. Our course allows interaction of anesthesia faculty and medical students in the preclinical years. Other benefits include resident involvement in medical student education, codification of education for these four essential skills and anticipated improvement in delivery of patient care.
REFERENCES:

1) A&A., 80:82 1995