Online Clinical Teaching: A Simple Model to Facilitate Students' Communication and Clinical Reasoning Skills on Distance Learning e-Platform.

Abstract

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. One of the most important outcomes expected from clinical teaching is to develop an adequate level of clinical reasoning skills among the students. This largely depends on the efficient retrieval of information from the patients, desirably in the way of direct history taking and physical examination. Communication skills play a vital role in making this activity maximally effective. In any situation when the direct contact between students and patients becomes restricted or compromised, a suitable alternative seems to appear to be a 'felt need' to support the students remain active and engaged in a similar kind of learning. During this ongoing pandemic, an online teaching model was devised to instruct a group of undergraduate medical students which appeared to be promising to facilitate their clinical reasoning (CR) and communication skills (CS) in a virtual environment. There is scope to make it more effective and to get it incorporated into our clinical curriculum as a part of its regular e-learning component. Out of a total of five weeks of online clinical posting, the initial two to three weeks' period was spent on teaching the very basics of the subject such as clinical anatomy, pathophysiology, and the most common and most important clinical conditions. This was then followed by the online history-taking sessions where the students played the roles of both simulated patients and student-doctors. The whole session was directly supported and supervised by a clinical instructor who offered constructive feedback at the various levels of the session. The method was well-accepted by the students, and it helped them develop confidence in terms of knowledge and skills that they later translated into their real workplace training effectively.