The teaching of trauma management in undergraduate medical education
- Author:
Siew Kheong Lum
;
Thiruselvi Subramaniam
- Publication Type:Journal Article
- Keywords:
Trauma;
Undergraduate;
Medical;
Education;
Teaching
- From:
The Medical Journal of Malaysia
2016;71(6):338-340
- CountryMalaysia
- Language:English
-
Abstract:
Background: The teaching of trauma in medical schools
faces many educational and logistic challenges. Issues on
what to teach, how to teach, when to teach, who will teach
and whether medical students with insufficient exposure to
clinical medicine can benefit from a trauma course are
unclear.
Materials and Methods: A well-designed one day intensive
trauma course concentrating on the primary survey was
taught to semester seven and semester eight students by a
multi-disciplinary team comprising of surgeons,
anaesthetists, emergency physicians and trained medical
officers. The course comprised of a pre-test of 30 multiple
choice questions followed by three hours of lectures, three
hours of skill stations and a post-test. The pre-test and posttest
scores were analysed using the paired sample t-test and
the independent t-test.
Results: The pre- and post-test scores showed significant
improvement for both semester seven and semester eight
students. Semester seven students, who only had a sevenweek
posting in Surgery had pre-test and post-test scores of
only 4% less than semester eight students who had an
additional six weeks in Orthopaedics and two weeks in
Accident and Emergency postings. The use of a multidisciplinary
team reduced the logistic burden of finding
sufficient surgeons to teach trauma management.
Conclusion: Trauma education can be taught to
undergraduates by a multidisciplinary team as early as year
three, in semester seven. However, the mean score of
semester eight students is only at 66%, suggesting that a
refresher course prior to graduation at semester ten will be
useful.
- Full text:P020170208415507109526.pdf
