Efficacy of focused teaching on chest radiographs: Comparison among novice clinicians outside the radiologic field

Purpose This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of focused teaching in chest radiography for different elective radiology novice doctors. Methods A 30-chest x-ray image test was administered to various novice doctors before and after a focused teaching session on the hidden areas of chest radiography. Novice doctors who pursued a radiology elective course in our institution were enrolled. The effectiveness of teaching was evaluated by the difference between a pretest and posttest scores. The competency among different groups of novice doctors was compared using improvement score. Results A total of 22 novice doctors participated, including 1 extern, 5 emergency physician residents, 10 internist residents, 2 Thai-graduated interns, and 4 foreign-graduated interns (F-INT). There was no significant difference in pretest score across student specialties. However, there was a significant difference in the score for participants before and after X-ray teaching (p < 0.001). Using the differences in pretest and posttest scores as an indicator of improvement, the improvement score differed significantly across the specialties (p = 0.04). Most of the groups showed positive improvement, except for the F-INT group which exhibited negative improvement. Conclusions Focusing on teaching in chest radiography has a positive significant impact on almost all novice doctors except the F-INT group. Different learners have different abilities to learn. Targeted teaching for specific learners would be more effective. Keywords radiology education, medical student, undergraduate, postgraduate, chest x-ray