MEDICAL TEACHING AT A PERIPHERAL SITE BY VIDEOCONFERENCING

The departments of Child Health and Mental Health of Aberdeen Universi ty's Medical Faculty recently took part in a 3 month trial assessing t he potential of video-conferencing as a medium for teaching students o n peripheral hospital attachments. The equipment used was British Tele com's VC7000 Videoconferencing System and an ISDN2 (integrated service s digital network) connection, which was installed between two sites. The locations used were a teaching room in the Royal Aberdeen Children 's Hospital and the Paediatric Unit at Raigmore Hospital in Inverness. This paper describes the resources required to support the trial, the methods used to run it and the results of staff and student evaluatio n of the trial. Evaluation forms were completed and returned by eight members of staff and by 30 fourth- and fifth-year medical students. Th e results indicated that, although after this particular trial both st aff and students rated the overall usefulness as low, they attributed this to technical problems and limitations specific to the type of equ ipment used rather than to the method itself. The overall impression w as that videoconferencing with ISDN has potential as a teaching tool i n the medical undergraduate course but that further improvements in im age quality and voice switching are required.