ABSTRACT
AimsIn Derby we have over 100 medical students coming through our child health rotation a year. These students come for 8 week and were classically taught with a combination of lectures, ward based study and face to face workshops. Students were welcome to come to the wards to shadow doctors and spent time in all areas including outpatients, CED and the wards.With the advent of COVID 19, social distancing changed our options dramatically. Balancing keeping students and patients safe, whilst providing students with a good learning environment was difficult but extremely important. Learning was becoming more self directed and virtual. Because of this reduction we noticed large gaps in the student curriculum that we were no longer covering and therefore sought to create teaching sessions to address these gaps.We wanted to create some face to face teaching sessions that could cover several aspects of the student’s curriculum in one go, focussing on areas of their curriculum that were now lacking. We wanted this teaching to be practical and succinct, and multidisciplinary if possibleMethodsAfter looking at the areas of the curriculum that were lacking we identified that students were missing out on practical prescribing practice and paediatric radiology teaching. Prior to COVID these has been separate sessions and they weren’t currently being offered so we sought to combine all three aspects into two workshop sessions of three hours eachWe met with the pharmacists and radiologist and discussed how best to implement this for the students and decided on a Case Based Learning approach. As educators, we created 6 clinical cases, mapped to the student curriculum. The pharmacy team then developed prescribing tasks based off these cases, and the radiologist then created teaching using these cases as a springboard.We piloted these sessions on a group of 27 students. We ran each session 3 times (9 students per session). We then gathered feedback using a Likert scale and collated the results and comments.ResultsWe trialled the session with a pilot group of students and sought their feedback. Out of the pilot group 50% responded with the most positive option, finding the session ‘very often or always useful’.The rest of the students also responded positively, finding the session ‘sometimes useful or often useful’. We also asked for comments as part of our feedback to allow us to see if any dynamic changes could be made to improve the quality of the teaching for the next cohort.ConclusionThis session is very similar to problem based learning (PBL) which is well described in the literature as it has been used for the last 50 years. By having a case to remember and guide their learning in a relevant context helps the students to achieve a higher level of understanding and improve their recall. We were pleased with the positive response amongst the students and this process has shown how we can adapt to an ever changing situation whilst maintaining good quality of learning for the students.