“Doctors’ Lounge” podcast to teach clinical reasoning to first-year medical students

Abstract

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. In the first year of medical school, our students have a comprehensive course in history taking, physical examination skills, clinical reasoning, and patient-centered care. We have observed that first year students struggle to conduct a focused history and perform a focused physical examination on a given chief complaint. We developed an innovative program to address this concern in our Essentials of Medicine- Physical Diagnosis course. We created an online outline and audio podcast for students to review illustrating the key elements of the history of presenting illness, review of systems, other historical patient information, and focused physical examination for 3 specific chief complaints to assist them in their approach to these patients. This resource also included the discussion of the work up and treatment plans and was created in collaboration of Internal, Family, and Emergency Medicine to account for the various approaches to the same chief complaint within the various specialites of medicine. Students completed a brief pre- and post-session survey to assess their utilization of the resource, quality of the content, and delivery of the session materials. The preceptor's were also surveyed regarding the students' ability to conduct a patient encounter and discuss their assessment and plan comparing current students to those in previous years who did not use this resource. We also asked for feedback on how these resources might be improved for future use. The resource was highly effective for first-year medical students in preparation for focused history taking and physical examination of a patient with a specific chief complaint. Students were more engaged in the critical reasoning discussion of the case assessment and plan after using this resource and preceptors were in agreement. We believe this model we called the "Doctors' Lounge" developed for the chief complaints of sore throat, chest pain, and abdominal pain can be replicated at any medical school desiring to introduce or enhance teaching of clinical reasoning skills to their preclinical students.