Keywords: collaborative teaching, continuity of care, communication between physicians
Background:
Due to the growth in recent years in number of patients with multi-morbidity, there is an increasing demand for care in the primary setting. To ensure optimal patient care and continuity of care, an effective physician-to-physician communication is essential.
Despite most medicine practiced in the community; medical students receive most of their training in hospitals. Therefore, the students are less exposed to the course of illness and daily challenges of chronically ill patients. Thus, it is highly important to expose medical students to primary care as early as possible and teach them the principles of communication between physicians.
Methods:
'Meeting Point' is an innovative project that brings together family and internal medicine physicians to jointly teach medical students., during their first clinical clerkship.
The project consisted of four meetings, each lasting two hours, led by the internal medicine tutor and a family physician, who came to the ward. During the meetings, the students discussed a hospitalized or a recently discharged patient. An intermittent dialogue was held between the family physician and the internist, in concordance to the stage of the patient journey in the medical system.
Open-ended questionnaire used for subjective assessment of the students’ perceptions and learning.
Results:
During the project, 12 internal departments participated, 30 meetings were held (62.5% of the 48 planned), 95 students attended, and 12 internal medicine and 13 family medicine instructors taught.
Students recognized the importance of continuity of care, recognized similarities and differences between internal and family medicine. They also deepened their understanding of the essence of family medicine, while observing physicians' ability to provide holistic care.
Conclusion(s):
The 'Meeting Point' is a very valuable project for student training. Through collaborative teaching, students have an opportunity to learn from both hospital medicine and community medicine, while bridging the gap between them.
Points for discussion:
Tips how to apply collaborative teaching
Challenges that arose during the project
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