Effectiveness of clinical rotations as a learning environment for achieving competences

Abstract

Competences are becoming more and more prominent in undergraduate medical education. Workplace learning is regarded as crucial in competence learning. Assuming that effective learning depends on adequate supervision, feedback and assessment, the authors studied the occurrence of these three variables in relation to a set of clinical competences. They surveyed students at the end of their rotation in surgery, internal medicine or paediatrics asking them to indicate for each competence how often they had received observed and unobserved supervision, the seniority of the person who provided most of their feedback, and whether the competence was addressed in formal assessments. Supervision was found to be scarce and mostly unobserved. Senior staff did not provide much feedback, and assessment mostly targeted patient-related competences. For all variables, the variation between students exceeded that between disciplines. We conclude that conditions for adequate workplace learning are poorly met and that clerkship experiences show huge inter-student variation.

Moral perception, educational environment, and development of medical professionalism in medical students during the clinical rotations in Peru

“…The period of clinical rotation is a teaching model widely disseminated in medical education at the international level. There is in fact a large volume of literature on the role that clinical experience has in the acquisition of new types of knowledge (Daelmans et al 2004) on professional skills (van Mook et al 2009) or in the relationship between students and teachers (Pitkala and Mantyranta 2003). Recent studies have warned about the challenges and difficulties that this model poses to health care institutions, which are forced to know how to combine professional responsibility toward the patient, with the responsibility of teaching the student (Duvivier et al 2014).…”

Implementing Formative Assessment at the Workplace: A Retrospective Analyses

“…Medical competencies can be achieved by testing the ability of medical student in integrating knowledge, skills and attitude (Daelmans et al 2004). The mini-CEX assessment entailed direct observation by an examiner of a student's performance in real clinical setting such as clinics and wards.…”

A programme of accelerated medical education in Taiwan

“…(1) be exposed to authentic tasks, such as those they would encounter in practice; (2) actively engage in learning, not just sit for lectures or observe others practice; (3) have opportunities to apply their learning in practice to build knowledge and develop skills and (4) be responsible for using resources appropriately (Gordon et al 2000;Mann 2002;Daelmans et al 2004). The critical responsibility of the faculty is to ensure that the learners received adequate supervision and support.…”