Students teaching students: A novel solution for teaching procedures via instruction on the corpse

Abstract

Introduction: Increased faculty and resident responsibilities have ledto the decreased time available for teaching clinical skills to medicalstudents. Numerous advances in education and simulation haveattempted to obviate this problem; however, documented success islacking. Our objective was to describe a novel fresh cadaver-based,student-driven procedural skills lab and to compare the educationaleffectiveness of student instructors to the senior instructor (SI).Methods: This was a prospective study performed at an academicmedical center. A pilot program, “Students Teaching Students,” wasintroduced where four trained first-year medical students (TMS)instructed 41 other untrained first-year medical students in technicalprocedures. This study compared the teaching evaluations of theSI with the TMS teaching equivalent procedures. Paired t-test wasused to determine statistically significant changes in proceduralconfidence between pre- and post-training. Utilizing a post-trainingquestionnaire, average post-training confidence improvement valuesand objective post-training test scores of the participants werecompared between TMS and SI, using a 2 sample t-test. Statisticalsignificance was considered as a p

Keywords

• emergency medicine. procedure. education. technical skills. airway