The next generation of peer assisted learning: Can allied health professional students contribute to undergraduate medical education?

Dear Sir

I read with interest the recent article, “Peer-assisted learning – Beyond teaching: How can medical students contribute to the undergraduate curriculum?” (Furmedge et al. 2014), where the authors discussed how peer-assisted learning (PAL) can be used to enhance medical school curriculums. I agree with the case studies in their article, and would also like to suggest the usefulness of PAL with students of allied health professions.

I am a final-year medical student and I have sat in lectures, tutorials and followed ward rounds through the last couple of years. All this time, I had been surrounded by other medical students on a similar journey of learning. It was only recently during my general medicine rotation that I came into contact with a student pharmacist for the first time. This was my first encounter with a student allied health professional and I was pleasantly surprised to come away with a valuable learning experience.

Through our brief encounter, I picked up important tips that will be useful as a junior doctor. Compared to the occasional pharmacology tutorial I received sporadically, he had 40 months of pharmacy training and this difference was clearly evident in our interaction. I came away from this feeling more confident in prescribing. I wonder why such a good learning opportunity had not happened earlier and more frequently in my medical training to date.

I understand that traditionally, medical training had always employed a top down structure, with senior doctors passing down their knowledge and experience to junior doctors and students. More recently, PAL has gained popularity in medical schools across the United Kingdom with many initiatives encouraging medical students to teach one another in both formal and informal settings. Although this is a great initiative, we are neglecting the potential in another form of PAL known as inter-professional education.

Multidisciplinary teams are common in healthcare nowadays. Allied health professionals and doctors learn from one another in their daily interactions. It is not difficult to see how encouraging PAL opportunities between student allied health professionals and medical students would help produce better doctors.

In the future, medical schools should promote inter-professional education and carry out formal research to ascertain its benefits.

Declaration of interest: The author reports no declaration of interest.