Assessing the use of E-Learning to Provide Nutritional Education within the Undergraduate Medical Curriculum for Third Year Students at Barts and The London Medical School: A Pilot aimed to Assess and Improve Confidence and Knowledge

Problem

The relationship between food, nutrition and health is complex yet current medical professionals receive limited teaching in clinical nutrition as undergraduates. It is therefore imperative that the current medical curriculum serves to reflect this and that learning outcomes are relevant to what is seen in clinical practice.A UK Undergraduate Curriculum in Nutrition exists within Tomorrows Doctors/Outcomes for Graduates, yet often learning objectives are dispersed across existing modules and thus arguably diluting the content and the relevance of what is a newly recognised core learning objective.By equipping ‘Tomorrow’s Doctors’ via a multifaceted learning tool aimed to improve confidence and knowledge in nutritional education; graduates will feel more able to identify and address nutritional needs of their future patients.

Approach

This pilot aimed to address this learning via the development of a compulsory e-learning module targeted at year 3 medical students (year 1 of clinical medicine) utilising clinical vignettes in line with the outcomes within the GMC Tomorrow’s Doctors brief. A vignette based approach is commonly adopted across medical education to help convey and assess an individual’s knowledge and understanding of a clinical area. By providing clinical scenarios encompassing nutritional components/issues a key aim was to assess individual student’s confidence, knowledge and perception of a given topic. On completion this would help to identify specific strengths, weaknesses and perceptions within the cohort helping to guide further development of this nutritionA nutritional module was devised by a clinical dietitian and general practitioner with a specialist role in medical education. An half-day teaching session was allocated for completion with relevant pre-reading material and questionnaires sent in advance. This provided a baseline assessment of confidence and knowledge and compared to post course assessment. The module was subsequently run across 3 successive groups involving 120 students per term, with an anticipated total number of 360 students on completion of academic year 2017/18.

Findings

Term 1 results (n=120 students) show a significant improvement in both knowledge and and confidence. Data has also been collected in terms of satisfaction of content, volume and access to the online content. Further knowledge will be tested at end of year exams.

Consequences

Incorporating this specific nutrition teaching into the undergraduate curriculum at an early clinical phase means that knowledge can be built upon both theoretically and and practically before qualification, and has the potential to be revisited and studied at further depth later in the course as the “spiral curriculum” permits. Further developments include looking towards a national accreditation of the module with the British dietetic association and research across several medical schools in terms of developing undergraduate curriculum content on nutrition.