Best Practices in Patient Education: Medical Students' Perceptions and Implementations

Abstract

Effective patient education can help achieve better clinical outcomes, especially when a patient is managing a chronic illness. Despite patient education being an important skill in the professional formation of physicians, little is known about medical students' perceptions and implementations of such strategies. After completing a chronic illness educational module, second-year medical students were asked to rate the importance of specific patient education strategies and to assess their use of said strategies in the module's project assignment. Results indicated students utilized different patient education strategies from those they initially identified as most effective.

Keywords: Chronic illness; Curriculum; Medical student perceptions; Patient education; Undergraduate medical education.