Objective: o Students often have limited exposure to breast care and exam skills during their clerkships, with the focus of teaching often falling to the Ob/Gyn clerkship or, rarely, general surgery subspecialty rotations. Our Brown Medical School Ob/Gyn clerkship was truncated from 6 weeks to 4 weeks due to COVID-19 impacts on student scheduling, thereby diminishing exposure to breast care and teaching. As a result, students reported discomfort with the clinical breast exam and faculty identified weakness in MS3 OSCE breast exam scores. We believe that competency in basic breast examinations and understanding both breast cancer risks and management of benign disease are skills that are useful not only for future Ob/Gyns, but physicians in many specialties. We therefore set out to create a new interactive educational format to improve MS3 learning of this topic. This toolkit will be available for students on-demand and be a resource for them throughout their medical careers.
Methods: We plan to disseminate this toolkit of virtual breast education videos on the first day of each Ob/Gyn clerkship block, reviewing the exam skills that are highlighted in the videos and the outline of high-yield breast health topics. In addition, students will be offered the opportunity for targeted one-on-one breast exam practice sessions in the simulation lab with resident teachers for additional simulated, hands-on breast exam practice. They will maintain access to the toolkit, having it as an resource going forward. We plan to survey students before and after access to the tool kit in regards to comfort with the breast exam and basic topics of breast health encompassing both benign and malignant diseases.
Results: The full physical exam virtual video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8d4uJsjRpQ. Student surveys are still in progress.
Conclusion/ Discussion: Training all MS3s to be proficient with the breast exam, regardless of their ultimate specialty training, will allow more equitable access for breast care to all patients.
Topics: Faculty Development Seminar, 2022, Student, Resident, Clerkship Director, Patient Care, Medical Knowledge, Practice-Based Learning & Improvement, GME, UME, Virtual Patient, Simulation, Standardized Patient, General Ob-Gyn,
