Developing ClerkCast: An Emergency Medicine Clerkship Needs Assessment Project.

Ben Forestell,Teresa M Chan,Ajay Shah,Lauren Beals

doi:10.7759/cureus.7459

Abstract

Introduction and Objectives: For Canadian medical students completing their emergency medicine (EM) clerkship rotation, developing an approach to undifferentiated patients can be difficult. Open educational resources (OERs) are a convenient solution, but faculty authored materials may not meet students’ needs. There is a lack of EM OERs that deconstruct these undifferentiated EM presentations for medical students. The objective of this study was to identify EM topics poorly understood by medical students to inform a novel Free Open Access Medical Education podcast curriculum for approaching undifferentiated EM patients for medical students.Methods: An online survey-based needs assessment was distributed to key stakeholders through direct email, social media, and the blog CanadiEM. The survey included 32 EM topics graded on a five-point Likert scale according to how much participants believe medical students require further teaching.Results: Over six weeks, a total of 74 participants completed the needs assessment survey, and 58 participants met the criteria for inclusion into our study: medical students (n=23) and EM educators (inclusive of resident physicians (n=19), and staff EM physicians (n=16)). A number of presentations (n=23) were prioritized by both students and EM educators to be of the greatest need for medical students. No presentations identified as high priority by students were not also identified as high priority by EM educators.Conclusions: The greatest mean topic scores in both EM educators and medical student responses included critical care and acute medicine topics. Of the 32 topics in the survey, 23 topics were determined to be high priority for the development of future online educational resources. Analysis of free-text responses revealed nine topics not previously listed in our survey. Our findings will be used to inform the development of our new open access podcast and can be useful for developing medical student curricula in EM.

Highlights

Introduction and ObjectivesFor Canadian medical students completing their emergency medicine (EM) clerkship rotation, developing an approach to undifferentiated patients can be difficult
Over six weeks, a total of 74 participants completed the needs assessment survey, and 58 participants met the criteria for inclusion into our study: medical students (n=23) and EM educators (inclusive of resident physicians (n=19), and staff EM physicians (n=16))
A number of presentations (n=23) were prioritized by both students and EM educators to be of the greatest need for medical students

Summary

Introduction

For Canadian medical students completing their emergency medicine (EM) clerkship rotation, developing an approach to undifferentiated patients can be difficult. The objective of this study was to identify EM topics poorly understood by medical students to inform a novel Free Open Access Medical Education podcast curriculum for approaching undifferentiated EM patients for medical students. The accessibility of FOAM online educational resources (OERs) has made it an essential tool in the emergency department (ED), with 99% of Canadian emergency medicine (EM) residents using FOAM for their EM learning [2]. EM is a mandatory core clerkship rotation in Canadian medical schools [3] On their rotations, students are tasked with caring for patients with a wide range of chief complaints, but may lack the clinical experience to formulate an appropriate differential for these cases. The majority of EM OERs feature content rarely applicable to junior learners, often glossing over the foundational knowledge to target practicing EM physicians [6]

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