Abstract:

Ongoing commitment to teaching is a fundamental principle of the General Medical Council’s Good Medical Practice guidelines. For foundation year 1 (FY1) doctors in the United Kingdom who have recently graduated from medical school, this is further emphasised in their Foundation Programme curriculum.

One way for newly qualified doctors to become involved in medical education is through near-to peer (NTP) teaching schemes, which have been established in hospital trusts across the country. This form of learning has gained popularity within medical education, with near-peer tutors well positioned to pass on recent experiences and knowledge.

Despite this, there is little data to indicate what prior training FY1 doctors have received during medical school to prepare them for delivering teaching. Additionally, the NTP schemes described in the literature are often focused on the experiences of the student as a measure of improvement rather than the tutor perspective. Moreover, very few of these schemes offer any form of training for prospective teachers.

Here we describe an FY1-led teaching programme that was established for 3rd year (clinical phase) medical students in a large district general hospital in the East of England. In contrast to similar schemes, we introduced participating doctors to teaching methods and the undergraduate curriculum through a dedicated pre-encounter workshop session. Unique to our project, we also assessed student and tutor outcomes, not only with anonymised questionnaires, but also qualitatively with a structured interview.

The results demonstrated improved confidence amongst the student recipients following completion of the scheme, with 84.6% reporting increased confidence for the upcoming objective structured clinical examinations (OSCEs), compared with 14.3% before the sessions. Improved confidence in delivery of teaching was also demonstrated amongst our tutors. The majority of students felt that near-peer tutors were better placed to prepare them for OSCEs than more senior doctors, a view unchanged following the scheme. All three of our students selected for interview believed that the teacher training workshop formed a necessary component of the scheme.

These results will be important in establishing the future role that NTP teaching has to play in undergraduate medical education, particularly as the availability of faculty continues to be impacted by the coronavirus pandemic. Though students were overwhelmingly positive about NTP teaching, there remained little appetite for this to replace mandatory aspects of the curriculum that were delivered by senior faculty. Pre-scheme workshops can be helpful in bridging the gap in teaching experience for new doctors and ought to be more widely utilised to maintain standards in undergraduate education.

Keywords:

Near-to-peer, undergraduate, foundation year 1 doctors, hospital-based teaching, teacher training workshop.