Role of Skill Laboratory Training in Medical Education - Students’ Perspective

To evaluate the perceptions of medical students regarding their training utilizing facilities provided in the skill laboratory of a public sector medical college.

Cross-sectional study.

Army Medical College, Rawalpindi, from October to December 2014.

Students of final year MBBS who had underwent skill laboratory training were recruited through convenience purposive sampling. Students not exposed to skill laboratory training were excluded. Data collection tool was a questionnaire having 23 questions with responses on Likert Scale as strongly disagree, disagree, agree and strongly agree coded as 1, 2, 3 and 4, respectively. Data was analysed on SPSS version 22.

There were 78 (57%) male and 59 (43%) female students out of 137, with mean age of 22.59 ±0.74 years. The response rate was 68.5%. Cronbach's Alpha test was 0.84 showing high reliability. The mean of sum of all the 23 items was 63.85 ±8.71, whereas item means was 2.78 ±0.38, reflecting a high inclination of students towards skill laboratory training. Frequency of students responding in favour of skill laboratory training was significantly high (p < 0.05).

Medical students perceived skill laboratory training as a favoured learning strategy as compared to practising on real patients for acquisition of various aspects of clinical skills, knowledge and attitude.