Why some clerkship students are not prepared for the clinical female breast examination.

Medical students’ experiences learning intimate physical examination skills: a qualitative study

“…Therefore students are often left unaided to deal with the difficulties they encounter but may not understand at a conscious level. In the last few years some authors have recognised this difficulty [ 4 - 6 , 20 - 22 ], though follow-through into curricular change does not appear to have occurred generally. Indeed, Nensi et al’s survey of Canadian medical schools published in 2012 found that there was very little teaching time and less assessment of the skill of digital rectal examination in their courses [ 23 ].…”

“…The difficulty of teaching both the technical and interpersonal skills of physical examination has already been recognised to some extent in the use of clinical teaching associates in Australia and overseas for undergraduate and postgraduate teaching [ 29 , 30 ]. Mathewlynn et al [ 31 ] and Siwe et al [ 22 ] have suggested that clinical teaching associates are particularly helpful for male students who have been found to be more anxious about learning pelvic examination skills [ 20 , 32 ]. While Powell et al [ 33 ] found that both male and female students were able to perform fewer examinations on the opposite sex during their training and were less confident with these examinations, the finding that the greatest distress around this issue was described as being in male students learning to perform pelvic examinations is not described elsewhere.…”