Effectiveness of short, personalised student assistantships: an evaluative study across eight London hospitals
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Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Objectives: Student assistantships are recommended to prepare medical graduates for clinical practice. Traditionally, assistantships have consisted of longer placements, often up to 15 weeks. However, within the constraints of the final year, medical schools need to carefully balance the time required for specialty placements, assessments and the risk of student burnout. We set out to evaluate the effectiveness of shorter, personalised student assistantships.
Design: An evaluative study on the changes in final year student confidence in preparedness for practice after a 3-week assistantship with defined learning objectives and learning needs assessment.
Setting: Eight hospitals affiliated with Imperial College School of Medicine.
Outcomes: Student confidence in 10 learning outcomes including organising ward rounds, documentation, communication with colleagues, communication with patients and relatives, patient handover, practical procedures, patient management, acute care, prioritisation and out-of-hours clinical work.
Results: Two hundred and twenty final year medical students took part in the student assistantship, of whom 208 completed both the pre-assistantship and post-assistantship confidence rating questionnaires (95% completion rate). After the assistantship, 169 (81%) students expressed increased confidence levels in one or more learning objectives. For each individual learning objective, there was a significant change in the proportion of students who agreed or strongly agreed after the assistantship (p<0.0001).
Conclusion: Overall, the focused 3-week, personalised student assistantships led to significant improvement across all learning objectives related to preparedness for practice. The use of the pre-assistantship confidence rating questionnaire allowed students to identify and target areas of learning needs during their assistantship.
Design: An evaluative study on the changes in final year student confidence in preparedness for practice after a 3-week assistantship with defined learning objectives and learning needs assessment.
Setting: Eight hospitals affiliated with Imperial College School of Medicine.
Outcomes: Student confidence in 10 learning outcomes including organising ward rounds, documentation, communication with colleagues, communication with patients and relatives, patient handover, practical procedures, patient management, acute care, prioritisation and out-of-hours clinical work.
Results: Two hundred and twenty final year medical students took part in the student assistantship, of whom 208 completed both the pre-assistantship and post-assistantship confidence rating questionnaires (95% completion rate). After the assistantship, 169 (81%) students expressed increased confidence levels in one or more learning objectives. For each individual learning objective, there was a significant change in the proportion of students who agreed or strongly agreed after the assistantship (p<0.0001).
Conclusion: Overall, the focused 3-week, personalised student assistantships led to significant improvement across all learning objectives related to preparedness for practice. The use of the pre-assistantship confidence rating questionnaire allowed students to identify and target areas of learning needs during their assistantship.
Date Issued
2022-12-22
Date Acceptance
2022-11-30
Citation
BMJ Open, 2022, 12 (12)
ISSN
2044-6055
Publisher
BMJ Journals
Journal / Book Title
BMJ Open
Volume
12
Issue
12
Copyright Statement
© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2022. Re-use permitted under CC BY-NC. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
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Publication Status
Published
Article Number
ARTN e061842