COMPETENCE-BASED LEARNING IN TRAUMATOLOGY

BACKGROUND: A multidisciplinary, competency-based trauma teaching prog ram was introduced for final year medical students (n = 67) at Royal P rince Alfred Hospital (RPAH) in 1934 to complement the surgical clerks hip. METHODS: The method involved small groups rotating through a seri es of teaching stations each structured to address a predetermined com petency, Four 3-hour sessions were held on the subject areas of resusc itation, plastic, orthopedic, and neurotrauma. Performance in the trau ma section of a summative Objective Structured Clinical Examination (O SCE), 6 months after the teaching, was compared with that of a control group (n = 121) from other campuses where trauma was taught by a seri es of discipline-based lectures. Three trauma OSCE stations were desig ned to test psychomotor skills while five addressed aspects of the cog nitive domain. Checklists were used to ensure standardization of scori ng in a range of questions asked or skills tested at each station. RES ULTS: The marks of the RPAH students (mean 78% +/- SD 9%) were signifi cantly higher (P < 0.0005) than the controls (mean 70% +/- SD 9%) in t he 8 trauma questions. There was no significant difference (P = 0.8) i n marks obtained by the study group (mean 61% +/- SD 8%) and controls (mean 63% +/- SD 7%) in 22 questions sampling a wide spectrum of nontr auma subject areas. The study group performed significantly better in one of the three skills stations and three of the five problem-solving stations when compared with the control group. CONCLUSION: The innova tion has the potential to fulfill a need for an integrated trauma prog ram in the undergraduate core curriculum. (C) 1997 by Excerpta Medica, Inc.