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Objective:General surgery residents play a vital role in the education of medical students; however, work hour restrictions has limited exposure of residents to medical students. Our department introduced resident-led, faculty-monitored teaching conferences to the third year surgery clerkship curriculum. This study assesses how effective these teaching conferences are on medical student shelf exam performance
Design:Retrospective cohort
Setting:An allopathic medical school and a tertiary teaching hospital in New England.
Patients:376 medical students taking the general surgery clerkship from July 2007 to March 2011 were included in this study.
Interventions:The surgery clerkship at our medical school is eight weeks in length. Before 2009, a standard series of twelve faculty-led lectures was given each block. After 2009, PGY-2&3 surgery residents gave at least 4 additional faculty-proctored lectures per block. Lectures were prepared and given entirely by the residents themselves on topics they chose.
Main Outcome Measures: Results for the NBME subject examination in Surgery taken at the conclusion of each block were compared before (July 2007 to December 2008, n=142) and after (January 2009 to March 2011, n=234) the institution of resident-led teaching conferences. Medical student performance on question topics was correlated with the topics of the resident-led teaching conferences they had received
Results:Multivariate analysis shows that medical students showed a significant improvement in overall NBME surgery national percentile performance since the start of the resident teaching conferences(58.5 vs 68.7, p=0.02). Medical students also did significantly better on questions related to topics covered by resident-led lectures compared to topics on which they did not receive a lecture (10.9 vs 8.3, p<0.01)
Conclusions:Resident teaching conferences have a measurable beneficial effect on medical student education.