Perception of First Phase Medical Students Towards Implementation of Early Clinical Exposure in Undergraduate Medical Curriculum

Abstract

Introduction: Early clinical exposure (ECE) is that teaching-learning methodology, in which the medical students are exposed to the patients much before their clinical postings, i.e., as early as the first year of medical college. Early clinical exposure (ECE) was recently introduced into the medical curriculum to bridge the gap between preclinical and clinical departments and help the students correlate the basic science teaching with clinical concepts. Purpose: The purpose of the study was to analyse the perception of students towards the introduction of Early clinical exposure in Physiology.

Methods: The study was undertaken in the Department of Physiology. The study was conducted after obtaining institutional ethical clearance and consent from all the participants. A total of 115 first phase undergraduate medical students volunteered to participate in the study. Students' perception about ECE was collected through their feedbacks using a pre-validated questionnaire containing both closed and open type of questions on ECE.

Discussion: Students agreed that ECE is a more interesting method, helped correlate physiology with a clinical case and understand the importance of learning Physiology. Students showed a positive response towards introducing ECE in their new curriculum.

Conclusion: We concluded that the students exposed to early clinical exposure sessions benefited more than those exposed to traditional learning only. We expect ECE will definitely create more interest in the medical students as future doctors and motivate them to think beyond the physiology classrooms, reading the disease process.