In China, with the improvement of the health care system and the medical legal system, it is increasingly unacceptable to learn and make mistake in living patient[15]. Nowadays, more and more people are paying attention to their self-health status, and the contact time between patients and doctors is being shortened, indicating that medical staff need to complete the correct diagnosis and treatment of diseases in a short period of time[16]. Dermatology and venereology is a specialized and practical subject, known for its complexity[17]. Furthermore, senior clinical undergraduate students are burdened with increased pressure, leaving students with limited time to learn and analyze the knowledge content. In light of this challenges, multiple teaching models came into being.
Stimulated STD diseases diagnosis and treatment combined with LBL teaching aims to involve students in the clinical outpatient process, integrating with the teacher-led instruction, thereby making up for the lack of clinical teaching at the undergraduate level. This approach cultivates clinical decision-making ability and subjective initiative, promotes students to engage in self-exploration, enhance the ability of diagnosis and differential diagnosis skills, and foster their interest in dermatology and venereology. The author’s study demonstrates that the average score of the experimental group is higher than the control group in the test of STD chapter. Besides, the enthusiasm of students to solve problems after class is also higher than that of the control group.
In the current medical education system, most teaching methods are simply “cramming system”, which difficult to form “bilateral interaction” between teachers and students in the classroom[18, 19]. The situational teaching model of stimulated outpatient diagnosis and treatment for STD is a new approach that adopts a “students-centered and teacher-assisted” method[19, 20]. It requires students to familiarize the basic knowledge in advance, engage in role-playing with a clinical scenario, integrate the personal cognition into diseases and enhance communication skills with patients, which promotes a shift from static lecturing to dynamic communication in teaching. Therefore, a questionnaire survey was conducted among students in the experimental group and control group after class, revealing that experimental group expressed significantly higher satisfaction with the joint teaching model than those in the control group (3.32 ± 0.89 vs 2.26 ± 0.93, p < 0.05), which proves that the joint teaching mode enhances students’ engagement and learning in class. Furthermore, the model emphasizes teamwork ability and doctor-patient communication skills, as well as the cultivation and development of medical ethic.
On the other hand, another advantage of stimulated outpatient diagnosis and treatment is its interactivity and timely feedback. In undergraduate study, interaction with teacher and receiving prompt feedback on incorrect answers are particularly important, as they allow students to correct their understanding at early stage of learning and prevent forming misconceptions. Following the stimulated outpatient diagnosis and treatment sitcom, we also design a segment for the teacher to address questions, provide comments to students, and facilitate students-to-students discussions, which ensures that students can learn from mistakes in a timely manner.
Our study was a randomized controlled trial, embedded in an authentic medical school curriculum, allowing for a direct comparison with traditional teaching mode. The chapters and teacher-prepared materials were consistent across the two groups. Both groups of students received same subject content, with the only different being the way it was presented. In order to maintain the knowledge content of STD chapters remained at the same baseline level for both groups, a preliminary examination was administered to them.
Based on all data collected, we found that there was no significant difference in the score of students in the control group (LBL teaching mode) and experimental group (joint teaching mode) in the preliminary examination. In the post-teaching test, the average score of experimental group were significantly higher than that of the control group (87.79 ± 8.64 vs 81.05 ± 8.57, P < 0.05). Additionally, there was also no significant difference in the scores of basic STD knowledge between the experimental group and control group (73.26 ± 6.04 vs 70.21 ± 6.89, P > 0.05). However, in the case analysis topic, the average scores of students in the experimental group were higher than that of control group (14.53 ± 3.35 vs 10.84 ± 3.22, P < 0.05). This might be attributed to the students are conditioned to positively traditional teaching method, which are same as the joint of teaching. However, the performance of the students in the control group was not as good as that of the experimental group in applying professional basic knowledge to clinical cases. It highlights that LBL teaching model fail to cultivate clinical thinking ability and clinical practice, which cause to the professional basic knowledge can not be applied to practice in the study of graduate students. Stimulated outpatient diagnosis and treatment combined with LBL teaching model address this shortcoming.
In spite of our research indicating that stimulated outpatient diagnosis and treatment sitcom enable students to strengthen clinical thinking ability, subjective initiative, teamwork ability and communication skills, there are still obstacles in promoting the joint teaching model. The primary obstacle is that script writing, roles assignment, and data mining require a significant amount of time and effort. However, senior clinical undergraduates have finite class hours for studying Dermatology and Venereology. Secondly, due to the different division of labor, only a small number of students may actively participate, while the remaining students may be loaf on the job, resulting in a greatly reduction in learning efficiency. Finally, the study failed to assessing long-term retention of STD knowledge and the teaching chapter of joint teaching model are too few.
One possibility for future research is going to address the time-consuming nature of stimulated outpatient diagnosis and treatment sitcoms, ensuring that majority of students fully devote themselves to the scenario in the shortest possible time and actively communicating with teachers. Another possibility is to enhance the assessment of long-term retention of knowledge in joint teaching model. Long-term retention of knowledge is a significantly important aspect in the field of Dermatology and Venereology.
With the growing demands of the medical education system on medical students, they are increasingly exposed to the case-based teaching models in junior grade of undergraduate course, in order to enhance medical thinking and differential diagnosis skills[21, 22]. In the future, joint teaching model is likely to emerge as a principal approach in medical education and teaching, as well as in the continuous professional development of dermatologists. With the scope of this study, joint teaching is an effective method of clinical medical education among undergraduates.