Comparison of students’ encountered diseases and available diseases at clerkship sites by exploratory multivariate analysis: Are encountered diseases predictable?

Abstract

Background: Students in clerkship are expected to gain clinical expertise by interacting with real patients in clinical situations. Monitoring and predicting the students' encounter diseases (EDs) is important for providing an optimal experience. EDs should be compared with the available diseases (ADs) at the clerkship site and with the required diseases described in some guidelines for the clinical curriculum.

Aims: To explore the differences in ADs as learning resources among different types of clerkship sites and to investigate discrepancies between EDs and ADs.

Method: A retrospective observational study used secondary data from government statistics to compare ADs of various types of observable clerkship sites by biplot analyses, which allowed multivariate comparisons. EDs collected from logbooks during clerkships at a university hospital were also compared with ADs across sites.

Results: The distributions of ADs differed according to institutional type, and EDs at Kyushu University Hospital were similar to the ADs for the category of hospitals in which it was placed.

Conclusion: EDs at a clerkship site may be predictable to some extent by analysing the site’s distribution of ADs, but further study is needed. Biplot is useful for visualising these types of statistical similarity.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank all the medical students who participated in this study for their contributions and dedication. The authors are also grateful to Dr. Joyce Pickering, McGill University Health Centre, and Ms. Christine Kuramoto, Hamamatsu University School of Medicine, for advice on manuscript writing.

Declaration of interest: The authors have no conflicts of interest to report.