The teaching of trauma management in undergraduate medical education.

BACKGROUND The teaching of trauma in medical schools faces many educational and logistic challenges. Issues on what to teach, how to teach, when to teach, who will teach and whether medical students with insufficient exposure to clinical medicine can benefit from a trauma course are unclear. MATERIALS AND METHODS A well-designed one day intensive trauma course concentrating on the primary survey was taught to semester seven and semester eight students by a multi-disciplinary team comprising of surgeons, anaesthetists, emergency physicians and trained medical officers. The course comprised of a pre-test of 30 multiple choice questions followed by three hours of lectures, three hours of skill stations and a post-test. The pre-test and posttest scores were analysed using the paired sample t-test and the independent t-test. RESULTS The pre- and post-test scores showed significant improvement for both semester seven and semester eight students. Semester seven students, who only had a sevenweek posting in Surgery had pre-test and post-test scores of only 4% less than semester eight students who had an additional six weeks in Orthopaedics and two weeks in Accident and Emergency postings. The use of a multidisciplinary team reduced the logistic burden of finding sufficient surgeons to teach trauma management. CONCLUSION Trauma education can be taught to undergraduates by a multidisciplinary team as early as year three, in semester seven. However, the mean score of semester eight students is only at 66%, suggesting that a refresher course prior to graduation at semester ten will be useful. KEY WORDS.