Simulation-Based Training for Radiography Students as a Solution in Covid-19 Pandemic: Student's Perspective from a Developing Country

Abstract

Background and Objective: Under the impact of the global Covid-19 pandemic, in-hospital training for radiologic technologist students meets several difficulties. The specificity of radiography sciences requires numerous practical exercises. We conducted a tutorial lesson for radiologic technologist students using X-ray simulation software to learn how to operate X-ray machines. The study aimed to evaluate students' satisfaction with the teaching method based on simulation software in radiological sciences. Method: 57 third-year radiologic technologist students were enrolled. All the students joined practical classes onsite from May to August 2021. The main training topic was routine X-ray radiography with in-house X-ray simulation software that was built by Hue University in collaboration with Duy Tan University. The satisfaction of students was evaluated following Likert 5 scale with 14 specific items. Descriptive statistics and a one-sample t-test were performed with SPSS Version 20 (IBM, USA). Result: The findings show that 68% of students were satisfied with the hypothetical clinical situation given in the simulation-based training class. One-sample t-test suggests that the average score of all the criteria is greater than 3, from 3.49 to 4.07. Most of the students wanted to participate further in a similar simulation-based training class in the future (91.23%). Simulation-based training software improves students' experience, radiograph creation ability, and image quality evaluation. Conclusion: Simulation-based training improves clinical skills, enhances visual thinking ability, and clinical practice ability of radiologic technologist students. This teaching method seems to be the appropriate solution for medical imaging technology training in the Covid-19 pandemic. However, further studies with a larger population are needed to comprehensively evaluate the effectiveness of the computer-based simulation teaching approach compared to conventional methods.