Engaging Pre-Clerkship and Clerkship Students as Medical Scribes in The Emergency Department

Abstract

The Emergency Department (ED) is a highly stressful and fast-paced environment in which doctors are challenged to efficiently adapt and recall knowledge to make safe patient-care decisions. A literature search was conducted to assess the evidence supporting the benefits of exclusively hiring pre-clerkship and clerkship medical students as medical scribes in the emergency department. Several databases were used to collect a total of (insert#) articles and studies to explore and summarize the benefits of its implementation. These include, but are not limited to, increasing medical student exposure to the specialty of emergency medicine, enhancing their clinical skills, and assisting students to pay-down their medical school-related debt. Furthermore, appointing medical students as scribes is mutually beneficial to the ED by helping to cut down the lengthy wait times for patients and reduce the significantly high rates of emergency physician burnout. We conclude that hiring medical students as scribes in the ED is a potentially beneficial practice that merits further consideration and analysis.

Keywords

• pre-clerkship student
• clerkship student
• medical scribe
• emergency department
• patient-doctor interaction