Creation and Evaluation of a Participatory Child Abuse and Neglect Workshop for Medical Students

Abstract

Background Since child abuse and neglect (CAN) is prevalent worldwide, medical students should acquire basic knowledge, skills, and confidence in identifying and addressing CAN. Significant educational efforts have been previously described, but none has focused on participatory methods to teach medical students CAN. Purpose To: 1) develop a participatory educational workshop in CAN for medical students, 2) gather, train, and establish a peer-to-peer teaching group, and 3) assess the effectiveness of the workshop in gain of knowledge and improvement of self-confidence for participants. Methods A two-hour workshop was created with role-playing, the use of dolls and peer-to-peer teaching. A 15-item knowledge and a 9-item self-confidence questionnaire were used before, right after, and six months after the workshops. Results Nine workshops in two academic pediatric departments with a total attendance of 300 6th year medical students were conducted. For the 69 students who completed the questionnaires at all three times, there were statistically significant gains in knowledge right after (p<.001) and six months after (p<.0001) the workshops. Similarly, self-confidence increased right after (p<.0001) and six months after (p<.001) the workshops. Self-selection bias testing indicated that these 69 students who completed all three questionnaires were representative of those who completed the pre-testing and the testing right after. Conclusions We successfully established a thriving peer-to-peer teaching group to conduct nine participatory workshops that improved the participants’ knowledge and self-confidence in CAN. This feasible and novel active learning approach may help address inadequacies in medical curricula.