Article
Teaching the concept of brain death in undergraduate medical education
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Published: | June 4, 2012 |
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Outline
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Objective: To establish and evaluate a new approach to teach medical students on how to assess brain death in patients.
Methods: 120 4th year medical students of the Medical School Münster (Germany) participated in a 1-hour lecture on how to assess brain death in patients. After this lecture, students were assigned to two groups. One group attended an additional practical course on the evaluation of brain death and was trained using a new high-fidelity simulation device that had been designed for this purpose. The other group did not participate in such additional training session. A questionnaire was filled out by all students before the lecture and afterwards, either after having participated in the additional training course or not.
Results: The additional practical training session significantly improved the students' performance in assessing brain death and supported self-assessment and motivation of the medical students.
Conclusions: By establishing a new practical teaching concept, medical students showed significant improvements in assessing brain death in a practical session. These improvements in medical education could have significant implications for the clinical assessment of patients in future.