JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Recruitment of highly motivated students for certain clinical practice is considered as an important goal for every medical teacher. It becomes more and more difficult to find out the right and effective teaching way within the extremely fast developing modern education environment full of insufficient and old-fashioned tradition teaching approaches and limited possibilities with patient-hands-on education, especially in Anesthesia and Intensive Care Medicine (AIM).

Objective:

Our aim was to highlight the importance of using motivation and the application of the modern concept “learning-by-doing” for recruiting the graduates of Medical Faculty of Masaryk University (MFMU) for AIM specialty.

Methods:

The subject “Individual Student Project” is an obligatory part of the pre-gradual curriculum of MFMU and is mandatory for registration of final exams. Our topic “The development of multimedia educational portal AKUTNE.CZ” has been offered since 2010. The objective was a development of supportive material for Problem-based learning (PBL) / Team-based learning (TBL) lectures aimed at acute medicine. The topic of each algorithm is dealing with AIM issue, but some of them are multidisciplinary. We performed the evaluation focusing on graduates’ choice of profession and specialization in medicine in 2017. Data were reported descriptively.

Results:

We evaluated 142 students who passed our "Individual Student Project" topic in 2010-2017. During this period, they developed up to 77 electronic Virtual Patients in the form of interactive multimedia algorithms (available at http://www.akutne.cz/index-en.php?pg=education--interactive-algorithms). Out of 139 students of general medicine, 108 students (78%) already graduated, 27 (19%) are still studying (after 12/2017) and 4 (3%) finished their studies unsuccessfully. 37 graduates (34%) work in AIM specialization and 68 (63%) work in other clinical fields of medicine. 3 (3%) graduates currently travel abroad. 57 graduates (53%) chose more-or-less the same specialty after graduation matching the topic of their algorithm. 37 (65%) of these graduates decided for AIM. In the year 2016, there were 41,600 physicians in the Czech Republic. AIM employed 2,207 (5.3%) of them. 525 (23.8%) were trainees without AIM specialization. Approximately one-third of highly motivated students, after completing their studies, selected AIM as their specialization and helped to expand the number of AIM physicians in the Czech Republic. Since 2010, our graduates accounted for 7.1% of all AIM trainees in the Czech Republic.

Conclusions:

The concept of "learning-by-doing" led to 34% retention of physicians in AIM specialty after graduation. This concept could be considered as an important motivating element of AIM selection after graduation.