Abstract

myPaediatrics: a website for learning paediatric clinical skills

Author(s): Dr Ralph Pinnock,Ms Fiona Spence,Mr Craig Housely,Mr Wen-Chen Hol,Mr Richard Smith,Dr Ralph Pinnock

Increased student numbers across five teaching sites, without a significant increase in teaching resources, motivated us to develop a website for our undergraduate paediatric curriculum that supports the development of physical examination and clinical reasoning skills. The website reflects our department’s philosophy that in order to be clinically competent our students must also be culturally competent. The website concentrates on providing learning opportunities not readily available elsewhere and helps students focus their learning by providing clear goals for study and direction to resources. As our students rotate through paediatrics they provide feedback using a questionnaire on the website which automatically summarises data as it is entered. This ensures that the website is responsive to student learning needs. The students find the website easy to access and negotiate and it helps to focus their study. The students value the videos demonstrating the physical examination of children because such visual medium complements the learning of these skills in their small group bedside teaching sessions. The ‘presenting complaints’ format encourages our students to store their knowledge in the same form that they will retrieve it when they encounter clinical problems. Practising with the presentations and case examples gets them used to using their knowledge as they acquire it. This is likely to assist them in developing the skills of clinical reasoning. The design of our website could be used as a framework to develop websites for other undergraduate clinical courses.