Developing the clinical psychomotor skills of musculoskeletal sonography using a multimedia DVD: A pilot study

Sonographers are medical or non-medical health professionals in the radiology field who skilfully manipulate ultrasound equipment to produce images that are used to diagnose medical conditions and abnormalities. This technique is also becoming popular amongst the wider community in other medical specialities and allied health professionals, due to decreasing costs and automation. This paper reports the findings of a pilot trial on the use of a specifically designed audiovisual tool to teach medical sonography students psychomotor skills to perform sonography of specific musculoskeletal structures of the ankle. A competency testing instrument was developed using the Dawson's psychomotor categories as a framework, which identified positive change in competency in several scanned structures following this intervention. Integrating a conceptual learning framework for psychomotor skills could be useful to guide the development of sonography training programs and assist educators to structure incremental teaching and assessment activities, enabling a more consistent approach to developing psychomotor skills. Alterations in instructional design using this technology may relieve some of the burden of clinical teaching in the workplace.