Triage live lecture versus triage video podcast in pre-hospital students’ education

INTRODUCTION: Triage is the process of determining the priority of patients’ treatments based on the severity of their conditions. The aim of the present study was to survey the effect of triage video podcasting on the knowledge and performance of pre-hospital students. METHODS: Sixty pre-hospital students were randomly divided into two groups of a 30-subject control group and a 30-subject intervention group. A pre-test was administered among all students. Afterwards, for the first group, triage education was offered through lectures using PowerPoint, while for the second group, audio and video podcasts tailored for this training program were employed. Right after the training as well as one month later, post-tests were run for both groups, and the results were analysed using an independent t-test and covariance. RESULTS: No significant difference was observed between the effects of both types of education on knowledge and performance, either immediately, or one month after training. DISCUSSION: We suggest that video podcasts are ready to replace traditional teaching methods in triage.