Building a tool to assess professional skills during pre-clinical training in Medicine

Abstract

Introduction: University graduates expect to acquire the necessary skills to resolve the specific problems that they are faced with in their daily clinical tasks. They also expect to have the potential to change and adapt their activities and organisation as such that this may better satisfy the challenges and opportunities that they face. It could be that the skills required for these scientific developments in the long-term (as professionals) may be very different from those required for short-term requirements (as students).

Objective: The aim of this study was to apply a questionnaire in medical schools in Panama universities. A probabilistic, stratified sample in all its stages is used. The aim of the questionnaire was to find out the opinion of medical students as regards pre-clinical assignments and the skills that need to be promoted by teaching them.

Method: It is expected that the questionnaire proposed is a suitable tool to find out how to develop the teaching process by skills. This will help in improving teaching quality.

Results: The questionnaire has several strengths: a) simple and easy to apply; b) impersonal
nature; c) its anonymity, together with the absence of the teachers involved in the assignment evaluated ensures freedom of response, and d) it is not adapted to be done in a fixed time, which makes it easier for the student responses.

Conclusion: It provides knowledge on the teaching-learning process of medical students.