Medical Student Introduction to ‘Patient Centred Healthcare' Through a ‘Constructivist' Learning Session in Cardiology: A Cross Sectional Evaluation

Introduction

A successful teacher is no longer on a height; pumping knowledge at high pressure into passive receptacles ... he is a senior student anxious to help his juniors said William Osler (Rani et al., 2012). While teaching medicine most doctors fail to realize their contribution towards the emerging tomorrow’s doctors and also how important it is to accept the idea of being a senior student. Where pedagogy applies to the education of children, educating adults is known as andragogy. Andragogy, introduced by Malcom Knowles is based on assumptions—about how adults learn and on their attitude and motivation for learning. Knowles emphasised on encouraging learners to develop their own learning objectives, allow an environment where they feel safe and comfortable expressing themselves and involved learners in mutual planning for the management (Kaufman, 2008). Jonassen proposed that constructivist learning environment provides multi-dimentional representations of reality and hence the complexity of the real world, knowledge building instead of knowledge reproduction, collaborative construction of knowledge through social negotiation and not competition (Jonassen, 1994).

With medical science incorporating new technologies for better diagnosis of a clinical situation in a patient we have come so far that today we are more interested in diagnosis than the patient himself, his needs, his affordability for the treatment and his concerns. Therefore a need was felt to conduct a qualitative and quantitative assessment of a new constructivist method of teaching where medical students were sensitised to see patient as another human being and not as a bundle of symptoms and signs. This qualitative and quantitative study was done to extrapolate and illuminate the actual situation of the patient and individualize the treatment and was different from the usual quantitative approach that may seek prediction, causal determination and universalization (Hoepfl, 1997). Data triangulation is one way to increase the trustworthiness of qualitative research and is considered a robust and comprehensive way to analyse data (Gliner, 1994). We applied data triangulation for interpretation of feedback from students, medical educators and organisers using different modalities of teaching. A ‘constructivist method’-with a discussion amongst students and medical educators on the broader perspective of the patient’s condition which not only discussed the patient clinically but also highlighted the emotional, psychosocial and spiritual queries of the patient with emphasis on ways how to help the patients and a traditional power point presentation method using a projector and screen with the teacher giving a didactic lecture and inviting questions at the end.