A Modified Team Based Learning Approach to Enhance Resident Education in Outpatient Internal Medicine

Mirela Feurdean,Genevieve Matthews,Daniel Matassa,Neil Kothari,Mohleen Kang

doi:10.15694/mep.2017.000176

Abstract

This article was migrated. The article was not marked as recommended. Objective: To implement a modified team-based learning (TBL) approach in ambulatory care education- for a large Internal Medicine residency program with limited resources- and to evaluate its effectiveness. Methods: 91 medicine residents were exposed to a modified TBL curriculum, composed of high-yield topics for ambulatory medicine. All residents participated in 10 TBL sessions per academic year. One faculty and one chief resident developed the pre-session reading requirements, readiness assurance tests, and clinical case scenarios for each session and facilitated the TBL exercises. At the end of the academic year, residents were asked to complete an anonymous survey online. Results: 72.5% of residents completed the survey. 96% reported being actively engaged in the sessions and contributing substantially to the discussions. A majority expressed preference for future TBL sessions. Educational effectiveness of TBL was at least as good or better compared to traditional lectures. Both faculty and residents expressed very high satisfaction with our TBL format. Conclusion: We successfully implemented a one year modified TBL curriculum to teach high yield topics in outpatient internal medicine in a large, multi-site residency program. TBL resulted in high resident engagement in the classroom and high satisfaction with the format by both residents and faculty.

Highlights

Medical training aims to instill the principles of self-directed learning, critical thinking, and teamwork in future physicians throughout their undergraduate and graduate medical education
team-based learning (TBL) resulted in high resident engagement in the classroom and high satisfaction with the format by both residents and faculty
Active scholarship detailing description of TBL implementation in residencies, according to the guidelines published by Haidet’s group (2012), is necessary to grow a body of evidence in support of a gold standard

Summary

Introduction

Medical training aims to instill the principles of self-directed learning, critical thinking, and teamwork in future physicians throughout their undergraduate and graduate medical education. Traditional lectures are passive teaching methods which impart a great deal of information in a short span of time but do not necessarily teach the application of the information to real-life patient scenarios. It enables learners to apply learned content through intra- and inter-group class discussions that are moderated by faculty. It has been shown that TBL improves students’ engagement in their learning and enhances critical thinking, content retention, and teamwork (Thomas and Bowen 2011), while academic outcomes have been as good or better compared to traditional lectures (Thomas and Bowen 2011; Fatmi et al 2013)

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion