ASSESSING THE ROLE OF EARLY CLINICAL EXPOSURE IN ANATOMY: A PERCEPTION AND FEEDBACK

Introduction: As students enter, they start learning three basic science topics namely Anatomy, Physiology and Biochemistry. Exposing the students to clinical cases as early as first year assists the student to learn relevant anatomy and its importance to medical diagnosis. So the challenge is to include such a method in medical education that would enhance the clinical education quality and one such method is Early Clinical Exposure (ECE). Early Clinical Exposure (ECE) is nothing but preparing the first year MBBS students to meet and learn from the patients. Methodology: Online case based lectures on the 2 topics of ECE were taken for phase I MBBS students of 2019-20 batch in Dr. Ram ManoharLohia Institute of Medical Sciences, Lucknow. Zoom Pro Platform was used after getting approval from Institutional Ethics Committee. For these sessions MCQ based pre and post test was designed to assess the effectiveness of case based approach rather than traditional way of teaching clinical anatomy and their feedback for the ECE was taken voluntarily on 5-pointlikert scale. Total 100 students participated in the study and the mean score of pre and post test was tabulated. Paired T Test was used to calculate the level of significance between pre and posttest of both the sessions. Results: Analysis shows significance difference between pretest and post test scores of the students in both ECE I And ECE II (p-value 0.000). Satisfaction Index was 86% . Conclusion: Early Clinical Exposure may be an effective technique to supplement the traditional teaching and improve the performance, knowledge and motivation due to better comprehension and correlation.