Clinical Case Discussions – a novel, supervised peer-teaching format to promote clinical reasoning in medical students

Abstract

Background: Clinical reasoning (CR) is a clinical core competence for medical students to acquire. While the necessity for CR teaching has been recognized since the early 20 century, to this day no consensus on how to best educate students in CR exists. Hence, few universities have incorporated dedicated CR teaching formats into their medical curriculum. We propose a novel case-based, peer-taught and physician-supervised collaborative learning format, dubbed “Clinical Case Discussions” (CCDs) to foster CR in medical students.Project description: We present the curricular concept of CCDs and its development according to a six-step approach (problem identification and general needs assessment; targeted needs assessment; goals and objectives; educational strategies; implementation; evaluation and feedback). Our goal is to strengthen the physician roles (CanMEDS/NKLM) and CR competence of medical students. CCDs are offered at our institution as an elective course and students work on real-life, complex medical cases through a structured approach. Over the course of five years we evaluated various aspects of the course and trained student teachers to optimize our course concept according to the feedback of our participants. We also obtained intro and exit self-assessments of CR competence using an established CR questionnaire.Results: We found an unmet need for CR teaching, as medical students in their clinical years view CR as highly important for later practice, but only 50% have ever heard of CR within the curriculum. Acceptance of CCDs was consistently high with over 85% of participants strongly agreeing that they would re-participate in the course and recommend it to a friend. Additionally, we observed significant improvements in CR self-assessments of participants.Conclusion: CCDs are a feasible teaching format to improve students’ CR competence, have a high acceptance and involve students in medical education through peer-teaching.

Keywords

• case-based learning
• clinical reasoning
• peer teaching
• curriculum development
• undergraduate medical education