Dear Sir
Although public health has been recognized as an integral component of undergraduate medical education, not many undergraduate medical programmes have systematic methods of evaluating public health teaching, making it difficult to improve the teaching of this important topic (Rowlands & Spasoff Citation2009). This study sought to evaluate the effectiveness of public health instruction at a multi-site medical school.
Public health teaching during the first-year of the medical undergraduate programme at the University of British Columbia consists of 10 three-hour weekly sessions that are evenly split between plenary lectures presented by experts in public health and small group tutorial sessions led by non-expert tutors. Plenaries are videoconferenced between the distributed sites (Vancouver, Victoria and Prince George) and tutorial sessions are locally delivered (Snadden & Bates Citation2005).
First-year students were given a pre-test before the public health portion of their first-year curriculum and a post-test afterwards. The pre- and post-test questions were created according to the Medical Council of Canada's enabling objectives.
This study had a participation rate of 91.4% (n = 234) of the first-year class. The mean score of the pre-test was 58.1% and the mean score of the post-test was 71.2%, a significant increase of 13.1% (p < 0.0001), indicating that students do benefit from the current curriculum format, although it is unclear whether or not a greater increase should be expected given the time spent on the material. There was also no significant difference in the change in scores when students were stratified by site (p = 0.87), validating the consistent quality of public health teaching across the distributed sites. Linear regression revealed a significant negative correlation between pre-test scores and changes in scores (r = −0.54), suggesting that students who initially scored high on the pre-test may not have been sufficiently challenged.
This study prompts further study into investigating effective models of delivering public health teaching in undergraduate medical programmes.
References
- Rowlands M, Spasoff R. An environmental scan of best practices in public health undergraduate medical education: An executive synthesis. The Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada, Ottawa, ON 2009
- Snadden D, Bates J. Expanding undergraduate medical education in British Columbia: A distributed campus model. CMAJ 2005; 173: 589–590