A novel Minute Feedback System for medical students

Medical students often report a lack of timely, useful feedback during clerkship rotations. The purpose of this study was to develop a novel Minute Feedback System and determine whether it would generate frequent, high quality, documented feedback for students during the third year surgery clerkship.

The Minute Feedback System was created using the Qualtrics^© survey software platform and piloted with surgery clerkship students. These students were surveyed about the frequency and quality of feedback and their overall rating of the surgery clerkship and compared to students who did not use the feedback system.

The initial pilot of the Minute Feedback System involved 6/34 M3 surgery clerkship students and generated a total of 70 unique comments from faculty and residents over 3 weeks. When the 6 pilot students were compared to the 28 students without access to the Minute Feedback System, they respectively rated the frequency of feedback 4.50 vs 2.83 (p < 0.01); the quality of feedback 4.70 vs 3.33 (p < 0.01) and the overall rating of the surgery clerkship 4.67 vs 4.05 (p < 0.01) higher. The system was then made available to all students on the M3 surgery clerkship (n = 31) over the subsequent 2 month rotation. 354 unique feedback comments were generated from 399 student requests (89% response rate). Students using the Minute Feedback System (n = 31) compared to students in the previous academic year without (n = 170) rated the quality of feedback (3.76 vs 3.4, p < 0.01), that feedback was provided during clerkship (100% vs 90%, p < 0.01) and the overall quality of the clerkship (3.94 vs 3.87, p = 0.2) higher.

The novel Minute Feedback System allows for frequent, timely, useful and documented feedback to medical students.