An Alternative to Traditional Bedside Teaching During COVID-19: High-Fidelity Simulation-Based Study (Preprint)

Abstract

UNSTRUCTURED Bedside teaching is integral to medical education and has been highlighted to improve clinical and communication skills, as well as clinical reasoning. Despite the significant advantages of bedside teaching, it’s usage within medical education has been declining and additional challenges have been added during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has resulted in a significant reduction in opportunities to deliver bedside teaching due to risk of viral exposure, patients declining student interactions and ward closures. Educators have therefore been required to be innovative in their teaching methods, leading to the utilisation of online learning, social media platforms, virtual consultations, and simulation. Simulation based education allows for learning in a low-risk environment and affords the opportunity for deliberated repeated practice with standardisation of cases. Several studies have been described in the literature, predominately using the Harvey simulator. The results demonstrate simulation-based training can increase student’s confidence, increase the rates of correct clinical diagnoses and improve retention of skills and knowledge when compared with traditional teaching methods. In order to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 upon bedside teaching for third year students at Hull York Medical School, a high-fidelity simulation based model of traditional bedside teaching was designed and implemented. The teaching sessions focused on asthma and aortic stenosis with all students having the opportunity to perform history taking and a focused cardiorespiratory clinical examination using SimMan 3G. Key aspects of the pathologies including epidemiology, differential diagnoses, investigation and management were summarised using an interactive powerpoint presentation, followed by a debriefing session. Overall feedback was highly positive with 91% of students feeling more confident in their clinical examination skills following the teaching session, all students recommending the session to a colleague and implementation of regular simulation being frequently requested amongst the responses.

Integrating a Mobile-Learning Platform for Enhancing Clinical Teaching: The Learners’ Perspective

“…This issue has resulted in declining BST practice, with the increased use of simulatingbased clinical teaching for replacing traditional BST (Watson et al, 2012). Using simulated standardised patients to replace authentic patients is an alternative approach for clinical-bedside teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic (Ajab et al, 2022). However, simulated-based learning merely complements authentic bedside learning, rather than completely replacing it.…”