Early Clinical Exposure - When and How: A Student's Perspective

Changes in the health care system have led to the introduction of early clinical exposure (ECE) from the start of the medical curriculum. The basic concept of ECE is to make the students understand the relevance of basic and laboratory sciences in the clinical context with the help of integrated learning. In our institute we introduced ECE in the form of clinical meets which are held weekly for 1 hour.

The aim of this study was to know the student's response towards ECE through clinical meets and to assess its effectiveness as an essential curricular component.

A questionnaire was developed for the undergraduate students to know the effectiveness of the programme. These questions were rated on five parameters ranging from strongly agree, agree, partially agree, disagree to strongly disagree. They were also asked about what they liked and what they did not like about the programme.

Out of 100 students, a total of 83 students returned the questionnaire. More than 75% of the students agreed that clinical meet has helped them acquire new knowledge and created interest in the subject. When asked about the best method for ECE, 71(85.5%) responded in favour of hospital visits. More than 65% of the students rated the clinical meet as good or very good.

ECE contributes to students learning and better understanding of the subject. They can correlate their basic science subjects with the disease and the patients. Clinical meet is a good method of introduction to ECE, but once a week hospital visits should also be included in the curriculum.