Aged-Care Residents: A Resource for Student Clinical Experience

Abstract

With an increase in the number of medical students and a decline in opportunities to access hospital patients means that alternative methods of providing formative year medical students with a real clinical experience have to be found. The aim of the present study was to examine students' and elderly aged-care residents' perceptions regarding aged-care residents being interviewed by medical students and whether residents are willing to be physically examined by supervised medical students. Second-year medical students (N = 187) and aged-care residents (N = 24) completed an anonymous survey regarding their perceptions of the interview. Medical students and aged-care residents generally had favorable perceptions of the interview. The majority of aged-care residents indicated that they would be willing to be physically examined by supervised medical students. These findings suggest that engaging aged-care residents may be a suitable avenue to provide opportunities for students to have clinical experiences during their studies.

Development and Use of an Instrument Adapted to Assess the Clinical Skills Learning Environment in the Pre-clinical Years

“…The precise factors contributing to those observations in the pre-clinical years--including the impact of the faculty teaching [14] and the learning environment on these observations, whether from a limited number of clinical experiences or from basic science training, are not well understood. Second, ongoing reform efforts are attempting to better integrate medical school curricula by adding clinical experiences to the pre-clinical years [15–17]. Understanding the impacts of curricular revisions requires assessing their effects on the learning environment.…”