Medical students' perception of the quality of bedside teaching in clinical years in the American University of Beirut

Abstract

Bedside teaching (BST) is a style of clinical teaching in medicine that is referred to as a triad phase, which involves clinicians (teachers), learners (students), and patients at the same time. It was indicated that many under-reported studies worldwide exist on student’s perspective towards the quality of bedside teaching. Besides, bedside teaching has never been formally assessed in Lebanon in any of the clinical teaching hospitals.

A quantitative, explorative case study was undertaken in the American University of Beirut Medical Center to explore the quality of BST according to the undergraduate medical students’ perceptions by tackling four aspects: learning climate, student learning, tutorial development, and BST value. A replicate questionnaire was conducted online via LimeSurvey and was adopted in this study to describe how clinical students perceive BST in November 2020.

A sample of 101 participants contributed in this study from both classes, year 3 and 4, in which all data collected were analyzed using Excel 2016 from Microsoft Office. Clinical students reported that the BST at AUBMC was perceived valuable and important in all four aspects. Nevertheless, few challenges arose related to the BST, centering on the instructors’ fair acknowledgement of the necessary strategies used at the BST.

Future directions should include conducting more BST studies in Lebanon in different medical schools in order to enhance the generalizability of the results obtained in this study. In addition, further studies are encouraged to take place in the AUBMC in different clinical clerkships to test the reliability of the results in each clinical department.