Background/Purpose:

Enhancing rheumatology fellows’ teaching skills in the setting of inpatient consultation may have a broad positive impact.  Such efforts may improve fellows’ clinical skills and overall patient care.  Most importantly, effective resident-fellow teaching interactions may not only increase residents’ knowledge of rheumatology, but may influence their career choice.  However, a number of barriers to the resident-fellow teaching interaction have been identified, including fellows’ teaching skills.  We developed the Fellow As Clinical Teacher (FACT) curriculum in order to enhance fellows’ teaching skills during inpatient consultation.

Methods:

The FACT curriculum was delivered over two 45-minute workshops during the three-day Winter Meeting of the Carolina Fellows Collaborative.  We evaluated its effect with self-assessment surveys and fellow performance on the Objective Structured Teaching Exercise (OSTE) before and after participation in the curriculum.

Results:

Nineteen fellows from four rheumatology training programs participated in the pre and post-curriculum OSTEs.  Of the 8 OSTE rating items, fellows scored higher on 5 items and the total score in the post-curriculum OSTE as compared to the pre-curriculum OSTE (Table 1).  Fellows’ ability to listen to the learner, encourage learner to participate actively in the discussion, evaluate learner’s ability to synthesize information, present well organized material and give feedback were all rated higher during the post-curriculum OSTE.  The average total OSTE score increased after participation in the FACT curriculum (35.7 versus 29.5, p<0.01). 

Eighteen fellows completed pre and post-curriculum surveys.  Following the completion of the FACT curriculum fellows reported more confidence in their ability to teach in the setting of consultation and in their ability to give feedback (Table 2).  Fellows rated the curriculum highly (4.1 out of 5) and 17 of 18 fellows (94%) stated that they would teach more frequently during consultation after participating in the FACT curriculum.

Conclusion:

The FACT curriculum, focused on teaching during consultation, improved fellows teaching skills and attitudes towards teaching.  Improving and increasing fellow teaching, particularly in the setting of consultation, may impact patient care, resident and fellow learning, teaching skills of future faculty and could potentially influence trainees’ career choice.

« Back to 2015 ACR/ARHP Annual Meeting

ACR Meeting Abstracts - https://acrabstracts.org/abstract/the-fellow-as-clinical-teacher-curriculum-improving-rheumatology-fellows-teaching-skills-during-inpatient-consultation/