Ophthalmology Urgent Care Preceptorship: Building Medical Student Ophthalmic Knowledge and Developing Residents-as-Teachers

Abstract

Purpose : Required ophthalmology education for medical students has declined steadily over the past decade. Although ophthalmology residents are expected to play a role in medical student education according to Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, few formal curricula take advantage of this. We propose a novel educational module intended to improve medical student ophthalmic knowledge while promoting the role of ophthalmology residents-as-teachers.

Methods : An ‘Urgent Care Preceptorship’ (UCP) program was developed for first and second-year medical students at Penn State Eye Center. Students spent up to thirty hours in a resident run ophthalmology urgent care clinic and attended ten hours of resident led interactive conferences. The impact of clinical and didactic experience was assessed using a twenty-question pre-test and post-test examination and a qualitative survey. A group of twenty first and second-year medical students not taking part in the UCP served as controls by taking the same examinations. Nine residents took part in resident-as-teacher workshops, facilitated small group didactic sessions, served as clinical preceptors to medical students, and completed a qualitative survey. Statistical analysis was performed using paired two-sample t-tests with P values < 0.05 considered statistically significant.

Results : Eighty five percent of recruited students completed the study (n=34). Of those, 20 were in the control group and 14 completed the year-long UCP. UCP and control participants completed a pre-test, with average scores of 33.6 and 38.5, respectively (p > 0.05). At the end of the academic year, UCP participants saw an increase of 32.9% (mean score of 66.5), while control participants only saw a 10.8% increase (mean score of 49.3, p <0.001). Two-thirds (68.8%) of students reported learning the same amount of information from a resident as they would have from an attending physician. The resident-as-teachers survey (n=9) demonstrated that although 55.6% of residents had previous teaching experiences, only 22.2% had received previous teaching training. The majority (88.9%) of residents reported feeling more confident in their role as a teacher after the workshops.

Conclusions : Our UCP could serve as a model that both enhances early medical student education in ophthalmology and develops residents-as-teachers.

This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2018 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Honolulu, Hawaii, April 29 - May 3, 2018.