Understanding patient involvement in judging students’ communication skills in OSCEs: A medical student perspective

Recent media articles have stirred controversy over anecdotal reports of medical students practising educational pelvic examinations on women under anaesthesia without explicit consent. The understandable public outrage that followed merits a substantive response from the medical community. As medical students, we offer a unique perspective on consent for trainee involvement informed by the transitional stage we occupy between patient and physician. We start by contextualising the role of educational pelvic examinations under anaesthesia (EUAs) within general clinical skill development in medical education. Then we analyse two main barriers to achieving explicit consent for educational pelvic EUAs: ambiguity within professional guidelines on how to operationalize ‘explicit consent’ and divergent patient and physician perspectives on harm which prevent physicians from understanding what a reasonable patient would want to know before a procedure. To overcome these barriers, we advocate for more research on patient perspectives to empower the reasonable patient standard. Next, we call for minimum disclosure standards informed by this research and created in conjunction with students, physicians and patients to improve the informed consent process and relieve medical student moral injury caused by performing ‘unconsented’ educational pelvic exams.

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Assessing Readiness for Clinical Practice: Students’ Perspectives of their Veterinary Curriculum

The Qualitative Report ◽

10.46743/2160-3715/2016.2505 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

L. Sanchez ◽

Alison Kwiatkowski ◽

Jeff Abbott ◽

Dana Zimmel ◽

Linda Behar-Horenstein

Keyword(s):

Clinical Practice ◽

Focus Group ◽

Patient Involvement ◽

Student Perspective ◽

Veterinary Students ◽

Clinical Rotations ◽

Effective Feedback ◽

Perceived Preparedness ◽

Clinical Curriculum ◽

Veterinary Curriculum

Studies describing the effectiveness of a veterinary curriculum from the student perspective are currently sparse. The overall purpose of this investigation was to describe students’ perceived preparedness for clinical practice. Three focus group meetings with fourth year veterinary students were conducted. Data were open-coded and categorized to identify themes. Four main themes emerged: Challenging communications, Un/appreciating curricular experiences, Documenting demands impede case involvement, and Hungering for timely, effective feedback. Overall students felt comfortable talking to clients about medicine but less comfortable discussing euthanasia or money; they appreciated the split clinical curriculum but questioned the value of the 1st/2nd year courses; they felt that paperwork on clinical rotations negatively impacted patient involvement; expressed the need for well-defined expectations regarding grading/assessment and autonomy on clinical rotations. Despite the reported issues, students expressed satisfaction with the split curriculum and readiness to enter their chosen field of study.

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