Authoring of Patient Education Materials by Medical Students: an Activity Designed to Demonstrate Communication to the Lay Public

Abstract

As part of their training, physicians develop excellent patient communication skills. However, with a constellation of responsibilities that impinge on a physician's time, it is not always possible to convey appropriate amounts of information such that patients can use this to enhance their health. Physicians also may not select the educational resources that best fit each patient's needs, based on educational level of the patient. At The Commonwealth Medical College, one strategy we have utilized to demonstrate to students how to deliver an understandable diagnosis, instructions for treatment, or other medical information, was having our first year medical students write pamphlets on a disease covered in one of our small group cases for problem-based learning (PBL). The goal of the pamphlet was to explain a particular disease in layman's terms, and to present information that patients would need in order to deal with a particular disease. Students were asked to write pamphlets during the first basic science course they encountered, the Cellular and Molecular Basis of Life. The problem-based learning case was on Bloom's Syndrome, a genetic disease discussed in this course. Different groups approached the project in different ways, but all had a great deal of creativity in their final product. We include examples of these brochures to demonstrate the effectiveness of this exercise. These brochures were part of the narrative evaluation of our students, as the course was pass/fail. Students were given verbal feedback by their PBL facilitator as well. We present three examples of these pamphlets, and include an evaluation of these pamphlets by the faculty not shared with the students in which we used the Suitability Assessment of Materials (SAM) tool to assess how well the students had met the goal of developing a useful tool for patient education and an on-line readability tool that assesses the readability of the patient education materials by several readability assays.

A Symposium-Based Self-Directed Learning Approach to Teaching Medical Cell Biology to Medical Students

“…When designing the curriculum for our new medical school, we felt that giving the students ownership of the material by allowing them both to learn topics on their own and to teach their peers would be an excellent way to incorporate active learning into the curriculum. Another way that we accomplished this was to allow students to author patient education materials based on a problem-based learning case, which demonstrated the difficulty of communication to the lay population [1]. This activity and the Cell Biology Symposium meet the strictest interpretation of the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME)'s definition of active learning, because the students defined their own learning and, in the case of the Cell Biology Symposium, generated learning objectives for themselves.…”

“…This was concerning to us since medicine involves a great deal of this type of interaction. Having switched to a more lecture-based curriculum for the first year of medical school, perhaps, it is time to reconsider the utility of some of our innovations, in particular the Cell Biology Symposium or opportunities for students to write patient education materials [1].…”

“…TCMC has used a variety of self-directed learning pedagogies to promote the student's understanding of peer teaching as well as life-long learning [1,2]. Based on our commitment to active learning, the authors formulated and implemented a Cell Biology Symposium offered in a MD year 1 pre-clinical course entitled Cellular and Molecular Basis of Life.…”

Validation of an educational game about first aid for schoolchildren

“…Therefore, it is believed that teaching first aid can be made available and addressed with schoolchildren through games. However, for effective learning about first aid, in which children will be able to act with greater safety in the event of an emergency situation (5) , it is understood that the game content and appearance validation is essential.…”