Abstract
Purpose :
Required ophthalmology education for medical students has declined steadily over the past decade. In order to enhance ophthalmology education for all future physicians and promote early exposure to the field, innovative educational approaches are needed. Although ophthalmology residents are expected to play a role in medical student education according to Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), few formal curricula take advantage of this. We propose a novel educational module intended to improve medical student ophthalmic knowledge and eye exam skills while promoting the role of ophthalmology residents-as-teachers.
Methods :
A longitudinal ophthalmology preceptorship program was developed for first and second-year medical students at Penn State Eye Center. Over the academic year, students spend up to thirty hours in an ophthalmology urgent care clinic under the direct supervision of an ophthalmology resident physician and attend ten hours of interactive conferences led by ophthalmology residents. The impact of clinical and didactic experience will be assessed using a twenty question pre-test and post-test examination and qualitative survey. Nine residents will take part in resident-as-teacher workshops, facilitate small group didactic sessions, and complete one hundred hours as clinical preceptors to medical students.
Results :
This project is currently ongoing. To date, 20 medical students have been recruited to take part in the Urgent Care Preceptorship. The students who have started the program completed a 20-question pre-test, obtaining a mean score of 42.8% (n=16). Second year medical students scored 45.0% (n = 9, SD = 13), while first-year students obtained a 40% (n = 7, SD = 13). Twenty medical students, not taking part in the program, were randomly selected to serve as controls. The students in the control group obtained a mean score of 38.5%. The second year control medical students averaged 42.5% (n = 10, SD = 8), while first-year control medical students obtained a score of 35.0% (n = 10, SD = 13).
Conclusions :
Once validated, our Urgent Care Preceptorship could serve as a model that both enhances early medical student education in ophthalmology and develops residents-as-teachers. Data continues to be collected to assess the effectiveness of the curriculum.
This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2017 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Baltimore, MD, May 7-11, 2017.