Pj. Mcleod et Tw. Meagher, Educational benefits of blinding students to information acquired and management plans generated by other physicians, MED TEACH, 23(1), 2001, pp. 83-85
At our university, Internal Medicine clerks are members of a team responsib
le for the care of patients hospitalized on a teaching ward. Clerks first e
ncounter their patients after the latter have been fully worked up by other
physicians who have examined them and initiated investigations and managem
ent. Clerks are thus deprived of the opportunity to practice information ac
quisition, hypothesis generation and problem solving. We therefore undertoo
k a 'blinding' initiative wherein each clerk was required to work up at lea
st one hospitalized patient per week without access to the patient chart an
d without knowledge of information acquired and hypotheses generated by oth
er physicians. Weekly data collection during the g-week experiment with 40
clinical clerks revealed that work up of 'blinded' patients was more time-c
onsuming and more difficult than work up of unblinded patients. Clerks were
appreciative of the educational value of blinding. Teaching faculty felt c
lerk 'blinding' to be a practical approach to approximating the true conduc
t of medical practice and as such was useful for student learning.