evPaeds: undergraduate clinical reasoning

Abstract

Background: Clinical reasoning is one of the most important skills that medical students need to develop. Our medical students learn clinical reasoning in small group discussion sessions and during their clinical attachments. We wanted to provide additional opportunities for them to develop these important skills.

Context: Our undergraduate paediatric curriculum is based on 25 clinical presentations, and is delivered on the website myPaediatrics. We used simple show-and-hide case examples in each presentation to illustrate to students how to use the knowledge and skills they acquire to solve the clinical presentations. These are popular with students but provide little opportunity for interaction.

Innovation: Based on two commonly available formats for the virtual patient, neither of which had fully met the specific needs of our undergraduate students, we developed hybrid software: evPaeds. Close collaboration with students and teachers ensured that evPaeds met the unique learning needs of undergraduate students. evPaeds incorporates the Paediatric Decision Tree, which encourages students to make decisions on investigations and management, with immediate feedback. Explicitly referring to the basic sciences in our virtual patients resulted in them being valuable to students in both the pre-clinical and clinical years.

Implications: evPaeds has proven popular with students to practise and develop clinical reasoning, individually or in small group sessions.