December 2013 NUI Galway Medical Graduates Deliver Intern-led Teaching programme to Final Medical Students

The final year of NUI Galway’s undergraduate medical curriculum has been enhanced by an intern teaching programme, which has been developed and delivered in first semester of the current academic year.

Newly graduated medical doctors teach NUI Galway’s final year medical students and simultaneously act as mentors and role models. This is achieved ‘by on the ward training’ whereby medical interns teach groups of five medical students and take them through the assessment of common patient presentations they encounter, covering history-taking, examination, clinical reasoning and management skills essential to becoming a competent doctor. Teaching takes place at the bedside, in a clinical context.

This initiative was conceived and designed by Drs Jennifer Scott and Miroslawa Gorecka, two recent graduates from the University’s School of Medicine. The teaching is ward based and revolves around bedside and clinical teaching, with 20 interns participating in this programme in semester one.

Dr Yvonne Finn, Academic Coordinator, School of Medicine at NUI Galway, said: “While the concept of intern teaching is not new, this is the first time that it has been developed into a structured programme. This allows teaching to cover topics in each of the key specialities and offers intern teaching to all final medical students who are currently on clinical placements in Galway University Hospitals.”

There are plans to continue this Intern-led Teaching Programme into semester two when those students who have been in the Medical Academies in semester one return to Galway. The final medical students will themselves be graduating in June 2014, and it is anticipated that many of them, having experienced the benefit of the Intern-led Teaching Programme, will volunteer their time and skills to teach and thus continue this valuable teaching programme.

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