Abstract:

Introduction: Clinical Skills Laboratory (CSL) provides the opportunity to practice every skill sufficiently, to give feedback to every student within humanistic medical education principles. To present Clinical Skills Laboratory program of our medical school which includes basic procedural skills and physical examination techniques. Methods: CSL is a part of the "Introduction to Clinical Practice" (ICP) program, which is designed for the purpose of preparation to clinical education and integrated horizontally to the first three years of the education in Marmara Medical School. In the second year CSL education program is composed of 4 sessions, each lasting 3.5 hours; the third year program is composed of 7 sessions each lasting 3.5 hours. Tutors from related disciplines participate in the practices. The program has educational booklets that include basic knowledge, guidelines and drawings related to the procedural skills. All the skills are evaluated by Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE). Skills are graduated according to their difficulty and the scores taken from all the skills are gathered to form clinical skill grade which is added to the ICP total grade according to the year percentage and finally added to the end-of-year score. Results: When the CSL scores are evaluated over 100, the lowest average score of the second year was 82.5(SS: 9.3) for the 2001-2002 educational year, the highest average score was 93.1 (SS: 15.3) for the 2003-2004 educational year. The lowest average score was 76.8 (SS: 12. 9) in 2004–2005, the highest average score was 84.7(SS: 12.6) in 2001–2002. In the student feed-backs related to the last two years; the content and the quality of the course, the contribution to the clinical education and to the professional life were the highest scores, the subjects that have taken the lowest scores were the sufficiency of free study times, of the place and the opportunity of practice. Conclusion: CSL is an important part of undergraduate medical education in our medical school continuing by improvements since 2001 and supported by the positive feed backs of the students.

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