Can Virtual Clinical Placements increase the senior medical student's motivation to perform evidence based screening in primary care?

Pavlo Kolesnyk, Vlad Lazaryk, Francis Ugwu, Louie Garnett

Keywords: medical education, virtual clinical placement, family medicine, general practice, blended learning, screening, motivation assessment, smart glasses.

Background:

Low motivation of Ukrainian primary health care providers to plan screening of common diseases depends on absence of the state program, lack of knowledge and scope to the other urgent needs of the population during war. Using technology in medical education can deliver virtual demonstration of the best clinical placements in order to change students’ motivation for screening.

Research questions:

Will use of the virtual clinical placements in education change the level of student's motivation to perform screening.

Method:

Groups of medical students complete a 2 week clinical OSCE-based teaching programme with common family medicine cases and simulated patients involved.

Students are assigned to one of two groups, each being taught the same content with emphasis on screening.
Group A in addition to the standard teaching, students will have a virtual demonstration of the real clinical consultation by a doctor using smart glasses.
Group B(control) completes only standard OCSE-based teaching.

Results:

Comparison of levels of motivation to perform screening using a validated questionnaire of motivation for screening before and after the teaching is going to be performed in groups.
The group of students who virtually take part in the consultation with real patients of different gender and age categories may get a clear vision of the screening planning in primary care.

Conclusions:

Engaging innovative technologies to the medical education can increase students’ abilities to gain hard and soft clinical skills including screening of the common diseases planning.This can improve students’ understanding and motivation concerning
screening, aiming for influencing their future practice as clinicians.

Points for discussion:

What other examples of using virtual clinical placements are beeing used in Europe?

What evaluation of the teaching quality could be the best?

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