Increasing Medical Students' Confidence in Procedural Skills Using a Junior Doctor-Delivered Bedside Supervision Program

Problem:

Clinical procedural skills are formally taught to medical students in clinical skills centers using mannequins. Exposure to procedural skills involving patients and opportunities to practice under the supervision of doctors are limited. Intervention: A bedside supervision program was piloted at a district general hospital in the United Kingdom. The supervision model was chosen as the method to increase medical students' practice in basic procedural skills because it allowed safe practice with patients. Context: The program was an optional component of the medical students' clinical clerkships. Off-duty junior doctors were recruited as voluntary trainers. The trainers obtained requests for procedural tasks from the on-call doctors and ward nurses, following which the trainers supervised medical students performing the basic procedures with patient consent. Outcome: The pilot program was successfully run for 4 weeks. Fourteen students took part, and 9 (64%) completed a postintervention feedback questionnaire. The students' confidence (rating scale = 1–5) in performing procedural skills improved from a mean of 3.0 (SD ± 0.9) to 4.7 (SD ± 0.5) following a supervision session. Although the range of skills was limited to opportunistic encounters, the students reported high satisfaction and felt supervision enabled them to identify areas for improvement. Lessons Learned: It is feasible to implement a junior doctor-delivered bedside program to supplement procedural skills training provided by medical schools. The challenges include reconciling the tension between junior doctors' service work and their teaching commitment, logistical issues such as recruiting a sufficient number of trainers and ensuring adequate coverage of training tasks.

Keywords:

• clinical procedural skills
• supervision
• medical students
• clerkship