Mentoring in the Clinical Setting to Improve Student Decision-Making Competence

INTRODUCTION: The physician-intern relationship can be difficult to develop. A new chiropractic intern in a teaching clinic undergoes a major transition from classroom to clinical practice and must learn to turn classroom knowledge into clinical application. The ability to start formulating clinical techniques and apply them on a patient is daunting. Developing a mentor relationship is difficult to do in a patient-care setting, but it can be done. Mentoring is a process of exchanging skills and values between 2 individuals with the goal of increasing the knowledge base and clinical skills of the intern. With this in mind, our group created short-duration small- group mentoring classes offered at different times on multiple days, permitting interns to have numerous opportunities to view procedure and ask questions about the topic of that day's presentation. METHODS: This project spanned a period of 3 months, during which time 6 clinicians were in charge of educating approximately 50 students. The mentorship model was developed so that in addition to the clinicians' regular duties of supervising patient care with interns, there would also be 3 15-minute sessions per week presenting a topic of a clinician's choice pertinent to the intern learning experience. RESULTS: 209 evaluations were turned in, with 5 students not completing the evaluation. Students overwhelmingly believed that these sessions were beneficial to their learning and provided them with the opportunity to ask questions in regard to the topics. CONCLUSION: Students agreed that these small group mentoring sessions provided them with more information than they previously had learned in the classroom. They thought that the sessions gave them enough information to be motivated to use the knowledge they learned from the session to make decisions on the topic when faced with a patient with a similar problem. This is a small survey sample that will need further review and trials to determine if it will provide the necessary feedback to help improve small group presentations. It will also need to be spread to other clinical settings to determine if it is beneficial for this style of small groups to aid other learners and to evaluate its helpfulness to interns in putting clinical information and evaluations together for practice. Follow-up studies could also include evaluating students at a later date to determine if the students are using the information that they are learning from the sessions.