As part of first year students’ early clinical exposure at Imperial College (First Clinical Attachment), the Department of Primary Care & Public Health has developed a new narrative and film session based upon a renal transplant patient’s story, with contributions from her GP, surgeon and renal counsellor. The aims of the session are to highlight holistic medicine, team working, good communication skills and give the students positive role models in a year when they meet few clinicians. Evaluation of the session using student focus groups suggests that the session highlights the following issues for students:
- the importance of multi-disciplinary team working in this patient’s care;
- the impact of the surgeon’s patient centred approach
- how sessions like this give the students a wider perspective on why they are studying medicine
- what sort of doctors they wanted to become.
Exposure to positive role models and demonstration of patient centred care and good team working does seem to have a positive impact on student’s professional identity development early in the medical course and we would like to include more of these sessions in the future.
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