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Altruism in medical education: assessing attitudes of hospital in-patients towards face-to-face contact with medical students during the COVID-19 pandemic

BACKGROUND: Limited research indicated patients were largely amenable to seeing medical students pre-pandemic. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the potential risk of nosocomial transmission and harm to patients from students. Patient opinions regarding these risks remain unexplored, wh...

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Autores principales: Gritzner, Alison, Scurr, Thomas, Pearce, Catharine, Sorrell, Lexy, Dalton, Georgina, Solola, Joseph, Derry, David
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9985091/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36870993
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12909-023-04066-x
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author Gritzner, Alison
Scurr, Thomas
Pearce, Catharine
Sorrell, Lexy
Dalton, Georgina
Solola, Joseph
Derry, David
author_facet Gritzner, Alison
Scurr, Thomas
Pearce, Catharine
Sorrell, Lexy
Dalton, Georgina
Solola, Joseph
Derry, David
author_sort Gritzner, Alison
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Limited research indicated patients were largely amenable to seeing medical students pre-pandemic. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the potential risk of nosocomial transmission and harm to patients from students. Patient opinions regarding these risks remain unexplored, which impacts elicitation of informed consent. We aim to identify these, and explore whether reflection on the risks and benefits of direct student interaction influenced patients’ attitudes. For guidance, we further explored measures to reduce perceived infection risk. METHOD: We designed an original questionnaire for a cross-sectional study, completed by 200 inpatients from 25 wards between 18/02 and 16/03/2022 at Derriford Hospital, Plymouth. Patients in intensive care, with active COVID-19 infection or unable to comprehend the study information were excluded. The responses of a guardian were recorded for inpatients under 16. 17 questions were included - the initial question, reporting willingness to talk with and be examined by students, was repeated following nine questions exploring risks and benefits of student interaction. A further four questions addressed reducing the perceived infection risk. Data is summarised using frequencies and percentages, and with Wilcoxon signed-rank and rank-sum tests of association. RESULTS: 85.4% (169/198) of participants gave an initial positive response to seeing medical students, and despite a third of participants changing their response 87.9% (174/197) remained willing after the survey resulting in no significant change. Furthermore, 87.2% (41/47) of those who perceived themselves at severe risk of harm from COVID-19 remained happy to see students. Participants reported reassurance knowing students were: fully vaccinated (76.0%); wearing masks (71.5%); lateral flow test negative within the last week (68.0%) and wearing gloves and gown (63.5%). CONCLUSION: This study demonstrated the willingness of patients to engage in medical education despite recognised risks. Patient reflection on the risks and benefits of student interaction did not significantly reduce numbers willing to see students. Even those perceiving a risk of serious harm remained happy to have direct student contact – a demonstration of altruism in medical education. This suggests informed consent should include discussion of infection control measures, risks and benefits to patients and students, and offer alternatives to direct inpatient contact. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12909-023-04066-x.
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spelling pubmed-99850912023-03-05 Altruism in medical education: assessing attitudes of hospital in-patients towards face-to-face contact with medical students during the COVID-19 pandemic Gritzner, Alison Scurr, Thomas Pearce, Catharine Sorrell, Lexy Dalton, Georgina Solola, Joseph Derry, David BMC Med Educ Research BACKGROUND: Limited research indicated patients were largely amenable to seeing medical students pre-pandemic. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the potential risk of nosocomial transmission and harm to patients from students. Patient opinions regarding these risks remain unexplored, which impacts elicitation of informed consent. We aim to identify these, and explore whether reflection on the risks and benefits of direct student interaction influenced patients’ attitudes. For guidance, we further explored measures to reduce perceived infection risk. METHOD: We designed an original questionnaire for a cross-sectional study, completed by 200 inpatients from 25 wards between 18/02 and 16/03/2022 at Derriford Hospital, Plymouth. Patients in intensive care, with active COVID-19 infection or unable to comprehend the study information were excluded. The responses of a guardian were recorded for inpatients under 16. 17 questions were included - the initial question, reporting willingness to talk with and be examined by students, was repeated following nine questions exploring risks and benefits of student interaction. A further four questions addressed reducing the perceived infection risk. Data is summarised using frequencies and percentages, and with Wilcoxon signed-rank and rank-sum tests of association. RESULTS: 85.4% (169/198) of participants gave an initial positive response to seeing medical students, and despite a third of participants changing their response 87.9% (174/197) remained willing after the survey resulting in no significant change. Furthermore, 87.2% (41/47) of those who perceived themselves at severe risk of harm from COVID-19 remained happy to see students. Participants reported reassurance knowing students were: fully vaccinated (76.0%); wearing masks (71.5%); lateral flow test negative within the last week (68.0%) and wearing gloves and gown (63.5%). CONCLUSION: This study demonstrated the willingness of patients to engage in medical education despite recognised risks. Patient reflection on the risks and benefits of student interaction did not significantly reduce numbers willing to see students. Even those perceiving a risk of serious harm remained happy to have direct student contact – a demonstration of altruism in medical education. This suggests informed consent should include discussion of infection control measures, risks and benefits to patients and students, and offer alternatives to direct inpatient contact. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12909-023-04066-x. BioMed Central 2023-03-04 /pmc/articles/PMC9985091/ /pubmed/36870993 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12909-023-04066-x Text en © The Author(s) 2023 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
spellingShingle Research
Gritzner, Alison
Scurr, Thomas
Pearce, Catharine
Sorrell, Lexy
Dalton, Georgina
Solola, Joseph
Derry, David
Altruism in medical education: assessing attitudes of hospital in-patients towards face-to-face contact with medical students during the COVID-19 pandemic
title Altruism in medical education: assessing attitudes of hospital in-patients towards face-to-face contact with medical students during the COVID-19 pandemic
title_full Altruism in medical education: assessing attitudes of hospital in-patients towards face-to-face contact with medical students during the COVID-19 pandemic
title_fullStr Altruism in medical education: assessing attitudes of hospital in-patients towards face-to-face contact with medical students during the COVID-19 pandemic
title_full_unstemmed Altruism in medical education: assessing attitudes of hospital in-patients towards face-to-face contact with medical students during the COVID-19 pandemic
title_short Altruism in medical education: assessing attitudes of hospital in-patients towards face-to-face contact with medical students during the COVID-19 pandemic
title_sort altruism in medical education: assessing attitudes of hospital in-patients towards face-to-face contact with medical students during the covid-19 pandemic
topic Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9985091/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36870993
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12909-023-04066-x
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