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Teaching clinical skills to new medical students: the Oman experience
Author(s) -
LINDER B. M. W.,
SAHA A.,
HESELTINE G. F. D.
Publication year - 1992
Publication title -
medical education
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.776
H-Index - 138
eISSN - 1365-2923
pISSN - 0308-0110
DOI - 10.1111/j.1365-2923.1992.tb00170.x
Subject(s) - medical education , class (philosophy) , health care , community health , psychology , medicine , nursing , public health , computer science , artificial intelligence , economics , economic growth
Summary. The College of Medicine at the Sultan Qaboos University (SQU) in Oman took up the challenge of moving away from a didactic emphasis in the teaching of family and community health by actively involving students in health care, requiring some clinical skills, as early as possible. This paper describes the experience of the Department of Family and Community Health at SQU of the feasibility of training first‐year medical students in the measurement of blood pressure within a few days. Our experience showed that proper training before starting fieldwork can teach clinical skills to students who have had no prior exposure to medical subjects. There was a strong correlation between the measurements of blood pressure of 638 individuals by the students and the supervisors. This experience at SQU has encouraged us to implement the idea of family‐ and community‐based clinical exposure for every class. Teaching of clinical skills is feasible in the field for new entrants, provided there is adequate orientation beforehand and skilled supervision of the students in small groups.