gms | German Medical Science

18. Internationales SkillsLab Symposium 2024

21.03. - 23.03.2024, Krems, Austria

The importance of focused preparation in peer tutor system

Meeting Abstract

Search Medline for

  • corresponding author presenting/speaker Ela Plavec - Faculty of Medicine, University of Maribor, Slovenia
  • author Iva Planko - Faculty of Medicine, University of Maribor, Slovenia
  • author Ana Vizler - Faculty of Medicine, University of Maribor, Slovenia
  • author Sebastjan Bevc - University of Maribor and University Medical Centre Maribor, Slovenia

18. Internationales SkillsLab Symposium 2024. Krems, Österreich, 21.-23.03.2024. Düsseldorf: German Medical Science GMS Publishing House; 2024. DocP1.2

doi: 10.3205/24isls42, urn:nbn:de:0183-24isls422

Published: May 27, 2024

© 2024 Plavec et al.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. See license information at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.


Outline

Text

Introduction: For over a decade, the Faculty of Medicine, University of Maribor’s peer tutor system has provided students with additional skills in medical education. This study aimed to compare the Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) scores between students instructed and graded by exam-specific peer tutors and those who were not.

Methods: We analysed OSCE results of our third-year general medicine students; 106 from year 2022 and 86 from year 2023. The students were taught and graded by the tutors on patient history taking, abdominal, cardiovascular, respiratory, and locomotor examinations. In year 2022, the tutors completed a three-day course led by mentors. In year 2023, exam-specific peer tutors focus groups, that focused on reducing variation in teaching, were created during the same course. Jeffreys’s Amazing Statistics Program was used to perform a statistical analysis of the results.

Results: The results showed a significant difference between the OSCE points from year 2022 and 2023 in all evaluated protocols (patient history taking (p=0.010), abdominal (p=0.041), cardiovascular (p<0.001), respiratory (p<0.001), and locomotor examinations (p<0.001)). The students from year 2023 achieved higher results than students from year before in all categories.

Conclusions: A distinction in OSCE scores emerged between the students who were instructed and evaluated by peer tutors from focused groups, achieving higher scores. The proven effectiveness of peer tutors focused group work indicates its practical relevance for future OSCE tutoring.