Effectiveness of Pre- and Post-Clinical Conferences in Improving Clinical Learning Among Midwifery Students of Jimma University: Pre-Experimental Study

BACKGROUND: Although clinical conferences are promising clinical teaching strategy for ensuring meaningful clinical learning, they were mostly overlooked. Thus, this study aimed to assess the effectiveness of pre- and post-clinical conferences in improving clinical learning among third-year undergraduate midwifery students of Jimma University. METHODS: A quantitative institution-based pre-experimental study was performed among consecutively selected thirty-four third-year regular undergraduate midwifery students of Jimma University from February 14 to 25/2021. Data were collected by using both a self-administered questionnaire and an observational checklist. The collected data were entered into Epi_data version 4.6 and exported to SPSS version 23 for analysis. To test the difference in the participants’ clinical learning before and after the pre- and post-clinical conferences, a paired-samples t-test analysis was done at a 95% confidence interval and p-value <0.05. To quantify the magnitude of the intervention’s effect, Eta squared was computed as an effect size statistic. The results were presented by text and tables. RESULTS: There was a statistically significant improvement in the overall clinical learning score from pre-intervention (M = 8.79, SD = 4.1) to post-intervention [M = 15.65, SD = 15.65, t (33)= 8.53, p < 0.0005]. Also, the Eta squared = 0.69 indicated a large effect size. CONCLUSION: Since pre- and post-clinical conferences resulted in improvement of clinical learning among the respondents, the routine utilization of the pre- and post-clinical conferences as an effective clinical teaching strategy should be encouraged among the midwifery clinical teachers of Jimma University.