Learning clinical biochemistry diagnostic skills through reflection

Abstract

Future health professionals need to acquire analytic and diagnostic skills for prognosis and management of disease. However, future professionals need to be provided with the necessary competences to interpret and process the increasing generation of data produced by the exponential advances in biomedical knowledge and techniques. A novel pedagogic reflective strategy was implemented in 2016/17 in the final year module, “Clinical Biochemistry”, shared between the BSc Biomedical Science (BMS) and BMedSci Medical Science (BMedSci) programmes at De Montfort University (UK).The strategy aimed to encourage students to use reflection to resolve three clinical biochemistry case studies of increasing difficulty distributed throughout the year, as reflection has been shown to be effective in facilitating continuous learning and gaining practical skills. Students voluntarily resolved each case study and were provided with comprehensive feedback and marks for different criteria, including ability to reflect and comment. Marks gained for each of the criteria were compared statistically between them and between two academic years (2016/17 and 17/18) of implementation of the strategy. A significant increase in the performance of students as a result of participation in this project was seen. Despite the short duration of this intervention, the reflective pedagogy implemented was shown to facilitate the acquisition and development of critical thinking and reflection, relevant skills for any future healthcare professional. Finally, participants improved their communication and scientific writing skills.