COVID-19 has altered clinical clerkships for medical students, providing an opportunity for telehealth with medical students to take center stage in the age of technology. This research brief demonstrates why and how to incorporate medical students into telehealth. For the purposes of clinical students, telehealth is a better educational alternative to in-person patient care than online modules. We performed a successful outpatient family medicine telehealth pilot program at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) that is currently being scaled up to other clerkships. This pilot was very limited in scope, but serves as a scalable model for future telehealth programs and curricula incorporating medical students.
The convergence of the major social events of the COVID 19 epidemic and the racial protests around the George Floyd killing spurred many conversations and calls to action for racial justice. The Behavioral Science Forum of 2020 invited a plenary presentation to discuss guidelines for medical education institutions to improve their anti-racism curricula. The plenary aimed to put forward the personal experiences of family medicine faculty contributing to dismantling racism in their institutions. Presenters provided (1) a breakdown of the step by step process of addressing these issues with faculty, residents, and staff, (2) guidelines for improving recruitment and retention of diverse student populations, and (3) small group breakouts and a subsequent discussion forum for participants to bring their experiences into the conversation and develop their personal call to action. The wrap-up discussion and “Zoom chat” yielded emotional responses and specific ideas for participants and other faculty in medical education to do their part in developing anti-racism curricula.
Introduction: Today’s learners use multiple forms of social communication, such as text messaging, that offer a promising teaching tool for medical education. The purpose of this study was to evaluate a diabetes care curriculum delivered through text messages for third-year medical students on a rural family medicine clerkship.
Methods: A pilot study of 119 participants were compared in a parallel group randomized controlled trial evaluating medical student learning and satisfaction with text messages throughout rotation compared to an email with the same content in their first week of rotation. Participants completed a 10-question multiple-choice test and six survey questions upon completing the rotation. The primary outcome was a difference between test scores among the two groups, and student satisfaction with the educational intervention was a secondary outcome.
Results: A total of 85 participants successfully completed the study protocol (34 text messages and 51 email) and were included in a per protocol analysis. The average number of correct responses per test was 3.32 (SD 1.29) in the texting group and 3.69 (SD 1.53) in the email group (P=0.259). Student satisfaction with text messages was 3.68 (SD 0.87) compared to email at 2.02 (SD 0.95) when rating the educational intervention on a 1 to 5 Likert scale (1=poor, 3=average, and 5=excellent).
Conclusions: Participant knowledge on a challenging posttest was not improved with text messages compared to an email in this pilot study. Satisfaction with text messages was primarily positive. Further study is needed to determine the effectiveness of this content delivery method.
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