Medical Students’ Exposure to Bedside Teaching

The “One-Minute Preceptor” is a well-known and widely used clinical teaching model which consists of five primary microskills: (1) get a commitment, (2) probe for supporting evidence, (3) teach general rules, (4) reinforce what was right, and (5) correct mistakes. In order to obtain a baseline measurement of the use of these microskills in an established clinical department, we shadowed medical students during rounding experiences and clinical tutorials throughout an 8-week clinical rotation and recorded their exposure to the microskills; combining the latter two into a single domain of “feedback.” We recorded the presence or absence of each microskill within 15-min intervals. Overall, commitment, probing, teaching, and feedback occurred in 49.0, 20.2, 89.9, and 41.8 % of the 15-min intervals, respectively. This observational strategy was an innovative approach to observe the quality and quantity of clinical teaching and provides a baseline to determine the impact of faculty development programs to improve clinical teaching. © 2014, International Association of Medical Science Educators.