Students’ perception of undergraduate ophthalmic teaching—A systematic review

Ocular ailments make up about 2-3% of primary care and 20% of emergency consultations, making knowledge and understanding of Ophthalmology basics and skills an important requirement for the young doctor. Designing an Ophthalmology curriculum needs to take care of the same and opinion of all stake holders is of paramount importance, including the students. This systematic review was undertaken to assess the perception of medical students, interns and fresh medical graduates about the undergraduate training they received. The search strategy included the following keywords: ‘ophthalmology’, ‘undergraduate teaching’, ‘students’, ‘interns’, ‘junior doctors’, either singly or combined. Databases searched include Pubmed, Cochrane library, Embase and Science Direct. The search strategy was to include studies in which any survey regarding perception of medical students/ interns/ junior doctors about their undergraduate ophthalmology teaching was included. Of these, after applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria, 19 studies were included. In general, the respondents in most of the included studies felt that the ophthalmology teaching they received in their medical school, especially Ophthalmology skills, was inadequate. Novel teaching methods like team based learning, flipped classroom are preferred by students to the traditional teaching methods and incorporating these methods in the curriculum will go a long way in improving the confidence of our doctors.