Developing Skills in Cardiovascular Primary Prevention in Undergraduate Education for a Vertical Integration of Physiology

pp 413-418

Abstract

Developing Skills in Cardiovascular Primary Prevention in Undergraduate Education for a Vertical Integration of Physiology Physiology is a discipline that plays a key role in the integration of basic and clinical science. Knowing and understanding the adaptive mechanisms of the body to the different physiological and pathophysiological scenarios are essential for clinical thinking. The growing gap between basic and clinical disciplines, particularly in discipline-oriented curriculum, has generated the need for educational tools in order to contextualise, integrate, motivate and encourage students in the active learning of the most relevant concepts of professional practice. We designed a course for developing skills in cardiovascular primary prevention that would allow undergraduates to calculate the cardiovascular risk in healthy patients, induce changes in their habits, and, at the same time, contextualizing the physiological knowledge. A total of 100 second year medical students were recruited from the chair of Physiology of the University of Buenos Aires Medicine School, together with 11 ex-students who took the first two courses with real patients in an school based on the OSCE (Objective Structured Clinical Evaluation) guidelines. The course consisted on six encounters lasting 150 minutes reflecting routine medical activity: physician office practice (50 min) and seminar-debate (100 min). The students presented oral conclusions of the encounter, integrating the patients seen in the office with the bibliography. The evaluation of physician office practice was made with a checklist of 33 items and a document of 16 questions. Training followed the checklist for each case (hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, smoking habits, metabolic syndrome). The course was completed by 96 students.
The difference between the pre-test and post-test scores obtained in the checklists (0 to 10) was calculated using the paired t test; showing a significant difference in the post-test score [3.80±2.08 vs. 9.60±0.58, pre-test - post-test difference –5.69 (95% CI –6.11, –5.277; p <0.001]. The present course and the school allowed incorporating the first medical skills in students without or with a little clinical experience in a significant area of public health.