Improving medical student performance in smoking health promotion: effect of a vertically integrated curriculum

Abstract

The majority of medical schools have curricula that address the health effects of smoking. However, there are many gaps in smoking education, especially in relationship to vertical integration. The authors aimed to determine whether medical students would better address adolescent smoking within a vertically integrated curriculum in comparison with the previous traditional curriculum. They studied two groups of fifth-year students; one group received a specific smoking intervention. Each group consisted of the entire cohort of students within the Child and Adolescent Health rotation of a newly designed medical curriculum. Two groups of students from the previous traditional undergraduate curriculum were available for direct comparison, one of which had received the same teaching on adolescent smoking. An objective structured clinical examination station was used to measure adolescent smoking enquiry. Intervention students in the new curriculum were more likely to enquire about smoking in the objective structured clinical examination than students who did not receive the intervention (p < 0.005). New curriculum students performed better than students from the previous curriculum, whether or not they had received the smoking intervention (p < 0.001). This study suggests that integrated undergraduate teaching can improve student clinical behaviours with regard to opportunistic smoking enquiry in adolescents.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

S.M. Sawyer

S.M. SAWYER is Director of the Centre for Adolescent Health at the Royal Children's Hospital, Professor of Adolescent Health, Department of Paediatrics, The University of Melbourne and Research Fellow, Murdoch Children's Research Institute. She has a major interest in tobacco control in relationship to young people.

R. Cooke

REGINA COOKE is a Consultant Paediatrician at Portiuncula Hospital, Ballinasloe, Co. Galway, Ireland. She completed a clinical fellowship in general paediatrics and adolescent health at the Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne from 2002 to 2004. Her interests include medical education and health promotion for young people.

J. Conn

JENNIFER CONN is Senior Lecturer in Medical Education in the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences at The University of Melbourne. She is coordinator of the clinical skills programme for the undergraduate medical course and is also an endocrinologist.

M.K. Marks

M.K. MARKS is Senior Lecturer, Department of Paediatrics, The University of Melbourne and Deputy Head, Department of General Medicine, Royal Children's Hospital. He is actively involved in teaching graduate and undergraduate students in paediatrics.

R. Roseby

R. ROSEBY is a respiratory paediatrician with a major interest in tobacco control, particularly related to children and young people. He has helped introduce systems to promote identification of parent smoking and delivery of smoking cessation messages at the Royal Children's Hospital.

B. Cerritelli

B. CERRITELLI is the research coordinator at the Centre for Adolescent Health, Murdoch Children's Research Institute, Royal Children's Hospital. She is involved in the management of a range of research projects in the areas of parental smoking cessation advice in a child health setting, cystic fibrosis and asthma.