The preclinical eye: do senior medical students know what is normal?

Abstract

At the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, medical students participate in a 12-week skills training programme, the so-called introductory course, which immediately precedes the clinical clerkships. Fixed items in this course are the slide consultations, sessions in which students observe and interpret slides. Students appear to have difficulty in distinguishing between slides with and without abnormalities. Is their preclinical eye not sufficiently trained, have they not been taught how to observe carefully, do they have insufficient knowledge of the normal anatomy, or have they seen too few abnormalities? In a pilot study we addressed the question of whether students can describe and correctly interpret slides of normal external female genitalia.