When a vomiting, simulated patient mannequin was rolled into the lecture hall last fall to teach large numbers of first- and second-year Wake Forest University School of Medicine students about the brain and nervous system, Michael T. Fitch, M.D., Ph.D., wasn't sure what to expect.
In the end, he got the results he was looking for. "I really didn't know what it was going to look like when I started," said Fitch, an emergency medicine specialist who developed the teaching scenario and conducted a pilot study to determine the simulation's success in a non-traditional location with a large number of participants. The research is published online today in Medical Teacher and will appear in the August print issue.
"It was hard to do and we really wanted to engage the students," said Fitch. High fidelity patient simulation of this kind has typically been done with small groups to teach clinical patient management and decision-making. What Fitch found through his student survey results is that it was well received in the large lecture setting. Students were overwhelmingly positive and the results will lead to future study of program expansion, he said. Survey results showed that 98 percent of participants rated the correlation to basic science concepts as very good or outstanding," and 99 percent felt the same way about the presentation.