A nationwide, resident-led teaching programme for medical students in Singapore: SingHealth Student Internship Programme Bootcamp

Sumping's Up: A Multidisciplinary Educational Initiative on Gastric Drainage Tubes

BACKGROUND

Nasogastric tube placement is widely taught, and tube maintenance relies on astute nursing care with adherence to both institutional and evidence-based recommendations. However, precise adherence to current recommendations relies on knowledge base regarding the identification of malfunctioning gastric drainage tubes. Troubleshooting skills are crucial in maintaining patient safety and recognizing malfunction.

METHOD

Educational sessions on nasogastric and orogastric decompression tube management, led by a surgical intensive care fellow at a level 1 trauma center, were offered to critical care nurses. A presession and postsession survey evaluated the nurses' subjective and objective knowledge and comfort with naso/orogastric decompression tube management.

RESULTS

Ninety-seven critical care RNs participated. For all questions, the proportion of correct answers significantly increased from presession survey to postsession survey (p < .001). Ninety-seven percent of all participants found the session to be very helpful.

CONCLUSION

Physician-led educational sessions on naso/orogastric decompression tube management were well-received and improved subjective and objective measurements of nurses' knowledge and comfort level with gastric decompression tubes. [J Contin Educ Nurs. 2020;51(10):484-488.].

Residency Prep Course Instills Confidence in Interns

Introduction

Physicians entering surgical residency often feel unprepared for tasks expected of them beginning July 1, including responding to pages, writing orders, doing procedures independently, and a multitude of other requirements. Our aim was to design a surgical boot camp to help graduating senior medical students feel more confident entering residency.

Methods

A two-week intensive surgery residency prep course was conducted in the spring of 2019 at an Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education-accredited General Surgery residency program. The course was designed combining aspects from existing prep courses and innovative ideas tailored to resources available at our institution. Medical students participated in the Surgery Residency Prep Course as an elective at the end of their fourth year of medical school. An anonymous survey was given pre- and post-prep course completion evaluating confidence in medical knowledge, clinical skills, and surgical skills. Data were compared using Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test.

Results

Six students completed the course as a medical elective. Students felt more confident at course completion in most aspects, were significantly more confident in all areas of surgical skills taught and evaluated, and nearly all areas of medical knowledge. Subjectively, students felt as though the course was beneficial and helped them feel more prepared for starting internship.

Conclusions

This course designed at our institution was successful in helping prepare and instill confidence in graduating medical students prior to starting their internship.

The efficacy of the new medical internship management network system

With the increasing number of medical students and scattered host hospitals, the traditional clinical internship management system has been falling behind. Thus, we have independently developed a new clinical practice management system based on the browser/server structure.We aim to evaluate the efficacy of the new medical management system on the quality of the internship and survey the users' satisfaction.This study was conducted on the students of Second Clinical Medical College of Southern Medical University, including 672 interns (non-user group) who had not used the system and 315 users (user group). We analyzed the scores of their theoretical knowledge and clinical skills before and after the internship, which served as the quantitative standards for evaluating the efficacy of the system. User satisfaction surveys were also conducted, including by interns, clinical teachers, and teaching administrators.An analysis of scores showed that the user group had more significant improvement in both clinical knowledge and skills than the non-user group after the internship. Significant improvement was found in the user group, while there was a slight difference in the non-user group. A total of 310 students responded to the satisfaction questionnaires effectively, most of whom agreed with the system's benefits of learning theoretical knowledge (98.1%, n = 304) and clinical skills (93.9%, n = 291). Additionally, 115 clinical teachers and 27 teaching administrators were selected using a random sampling method for the survey. The results showed that 96.3% of the teachers considered the system to be helpful for improving teaching quality, and 92.6% administrators thought it was useful for implementing management. Over 90% of the participants in the 3 user groups reported a strong satisfaction of the system.With high level of user satisfaction, this system helps to strengthen the management for interns and improves the medical knowledge and skills of interns. Hence, it could be widely used in medical colleges and even in other fields.