Performance in cardiac examination and diagnostic accuracy after training medical students with simulators vs. patients

Abstract

Introduction: To ensure a good medical preparation and reduce the risk of mistakes, different methods and techniques for the development of clinical practice are used; cardiac examination skills decrease along the time. For this porpoise simulation is implemented on the teaching process, and the impact of it on performance of cardiac auscultation should be assessed. 
Objective: We aimed to compare 4th-year med students’ performance and diagnostic accuracy during the cardiac examination, before and after training. 
Method: The sample comprised forty-five 4th year med students randomized into two groups. One group was trained with cardiac simulators and the other with patients exclusively. We assessed their ability to perform a cardiac examination and the diagnostic accuracy by using a standardized assessment checklist for a cardiac examination and then performed a statistic test to compare both groups’ performance. 
Results: There was a difference between both groups’ initial scores of 2 decimals (7.1 and 7.3 on a 0-10 scale). After training, we found that the patients’ trained group had an average score of 8.6 while the simulators trained group had an average score of 8.8 and higher  diagnosis accuracy.
Conclusions: Clinical simulation and patient training are two different ways of achieving the same goal. There are many reports that claim simulation is best to train medical students, but in this report, we did not observe a statistical difference among them. This is not  however, a disadvantage. Clinical simulation offers better learning experience, shown as a tendency in the scores and better diagnostic accuracy. The lack of significant difference between the simulator/patient groups can be explained by a small sample size.