Abstract

COMET: Clinically Observed Medical Education Tutorial - a novel educational method in clinical skills

Author(s): Dr Rajiv Nair,Dr John Morrissey,Delia Carasco,Shani Desilva,Dr Vinod Patel

Introduction: The modern clinical environment demands clear evidence of competency in core clinical skills for the sake of both patient safety and delivery of effective and evidence-based clinical care. Lecture and tutorials both suffer from variability in student attention and often information overload. Clinical teachers often have too much to teach and want to “share all the pearls of ones wisdom” The COMET educational method attempted to teach and evaluate core clinical skills required to sort out a common clinical problem.

Objective: To critically assess the use of a novel approach, COMET (Clinical Objective medical education tutorial) in teaching medical students.

Design: Evaluate and teach at a four station OSCE based on a common clinical problem: - Chronic obstructive Airways disease

Setting: George Eliot Hospital Teaching Education centre.

Students: Warwick Medical students (Phase II) Year three Medical students. Main Outcome measures: Students own perceptions of learning prior to tutorial and after tutorial with educational feedback provided at each station.

Results: Students reported low levels of confidence prior to exercise particularly with regards to acute management, oxygen therapy and writing a discharge summary, with marked improvement after the session. Profiency in Communication skills to a large extent predicted overall competence to a greater degree. Students rated the tutorial highly and were keen to see it being used in other clinical settings.

Conclusion: This study has demonstrated that it is both practical and feasible to conduct an OSCE as an evaluation and teaching model for common clinical problems