Re-visiting the educational environment of a metropolitan medical school in Sri Lanka with special emphasis on clinical learning

Dilmini Karunaratne, Madawa Chandratilake

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Abstract

Introduction: Clinical competence is central to effective and efficient medical practice. Thus, clinicaltraining lies at the heart of undergraduate medical education. This study examined medicalundergraduates’ perceptions of their clinical learning environment as a means to identify service gapsand work towards remediation.
Methods: The DREEM (Dundee Ready Educational Environment Measure) questionnaire was used tomeasure student perceptions on their clinical learning environment from 262 medical undergraduatesat different seniority levels of clinical training. Additionally, two open ended questions were asked.
Results: Overall student perception reflected as overall DREEM score, was more positive on the clinicallearning environment. However, sub domain scores revealed “Students’ perception of learning”significantly increases and “Students’ perception of teachers” significantly reduces with advancing yearsof seniority. Analysis of individual items under each sub-domain revealed problem areas having scoresof 2 or less representing all subscales. The thematic analysis of qualitative comments resulted in severalthemes verifying and elaborating more on quantitative findings.
Conclusions: Despite overall positive student perception scores on the existing clinical learningenvironment, detailed analysis revealed several problem areas representing all sub domains at avariable degree. Majority of the problems were related to the domain on “students’ perception ofteachers”. Several other issues related to clinical rotations and the undergraduate medical curriculumwas identified creating a vicious circle of ineffective student learning and poor clinical performance.Therefore, the DREEM questionnaire along with qualitative comments could be considered as a costeffective means of obtaining a broader understanding of any learning environment and could beadopted by an organization to add more depth into quantitative analysis
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)23-31
Number of pages9
JournalSouth-East Asian Journal of Medical Education
Volume10
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2016

Keywords

  • clinical learning environment
  • DREEM questionnaire
  • Dundee Ready Educational Environment Measure

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