Inga Hege
University of Munich
Abstract:
Evaluation has shown little interest in
occupational medicine among 4th year medical students. Moreover occupational
medicine has rather poor results in the second state exam. Our object was to
develop and evaluate an interactive computer based approach to teach medical
students occupational medicine and to prepare them for the exam. Our main
aspects were to create a learning tool which is self-explaining, requires no
computer experience, is easily accessible and platform-independent.
Methods:
The program was designed in HTML and
Javascript. It presents a guided tour of the patient’s case history, followed
by information on practice and theory of occupational medicine. Interspersed
throughout the presentation students are required to answer questions, which
are designed to assess the level of understanding and are taken from the second
state exam. So in total there are 80 questions (35 during the cases and 45 as a
separate training unit) from the second state exam available and the students
get an immediate control of success. After completing the case, students are
given their score-summary and can revisit any part of the program. To assess
the effectiveness and acceptability of the program students were asked to
complete an 18 questions questionnaire. Each question was scored >from 1 to
6 (1=very high, 6=very low).
The program was integrated into
curriculum in the 1999 summerterm and the following winterterm. Two students
worked together on one of the three cases of authentic patients while a tutor
was present all the time.
Results:
A total of 287 students participated in
the evaluation of the program. Although the medium score for computer
experience was scored 3, the tutor noticed that most of the students showed
precariousness handling the computer. Nevertheless they highly recommended the
program structure (medium score = 2) and had no difficulties in working with
the program (medium score = 6). The medium score for fun, concentration and
motivation was 3, whereas interest in occupational medicine was scored 4.
Conclusions:
The program represents a
student-oriented combination of preparation for the second state exam and
occupational medicine course. Furthermore it points out the clinical and
practical aspects of occupational medicine by showing authentic patients, which
is important, because "real patients" are often not available for the
occupational medicine course.
Benefit in Attending
Session:
This program was the first teaching program in occupational medicine in Germany. It demonstrates how to create a simple, platform independent program only with HTML and JavaScript.
PRIMARY AUTHOR'S
INFORMATION
Inga Hege
Landsbergerstr. 3
80339 Muenchen
Telephone Number: 089-54076167
E-mail Address: hegei@ibe.med.uni-muenchen.de
Web Site: http://www.kurs1.ibe.med.uni-muenchen.de/~hegei/arbeitsmedizin/vorlage.html
CO-AUTHORS'
INFORMATION
Katja Radon, Martin Dugas, Dennis Nowak