How video cases in preparatory teaching influence students’ approaches to patients in psychiatric clerkship. A qualitative study.

Background This study explored how a preparatory teaching format using patient cases portrayed in videos influenced medical students’ clinical learning and practice experiences in their psychiatric clerkship.Methods The study applied a qualitative explorative design. We asked the students to draw their experience with a patient encounter in real clinical setting. Subsequently we interviewed the students unfold the students’ perspectives on how they navigated learning from the preparatory teaching in their clerkship. Data was transcribed verbatim and coded by an inductive thematic analysis.ResultsThe results demonstrated that students’ use of learning from the video cases varied according to their roles in patient encounter situations in their clerkship. Students having active roles in the diagnostic interview adopted a patient-centred focus demonstrated by empathic engagement with the patient and self-reflexivity related to the video cases. Students with passive roles, observing a doctor, described a self-centred focus on how to adopt an appropriate appearance and copied the surface behaviour of the simulated doctors in the video cases.Conclusion Our study findings contribute to broadening the understanding of how video cases in preparatory teaching formats affect students’ approach to patient encounters and their clinical learning experience. The results also reflect the importance of active engagement of students in the clinical learning context if preparatory teaching should have an effect.

Attitudes of medical students in Ireland towards psychiatry: comparison of students from 1994 and 2010

Aims and methodWe assess and compare: (a) the attitudes of final-year medical students in 2010 to their 1994 counterparts; (b) the attitudes of third-year medical students with those of their final-year colleagues; (c) the impact of two different teaching modules on students' attitudes. All students completing the year 3 psychiatry preclinical module and the final-year clinical clerkship were asked to anonymously complete three well-validated attitudinal questionnaires on the first and final day of their module in psychiatry.ResultsThese data indicate that Irish medical students have a positive attitude to psychiatry even prior to the start of their clinical training in psychiatry. This attitude is significantly more positive now than it was in 1994. A positive attitudinal change was brought about only by the final-year psychiatric clerkship. Students who have completed a degree prior to medicine are less likely to express an interest in a career in psychiatry.Clinical implicationsIf we are to address the recruitment difficulties in psychiatry we need to look at innovative and specific ways of translating these positive attitudes into careers in psychiatry.