Evaluating a postgraduate teaching intervention among pathology trainees on medical liability

Pathology is a specialty of high malpractice risk. For that reason, we programmed a training session of the residents in Pathology with an association of traditional methods of learning and case-based brainstorming sessions.

We aimed to train them about our national tort law and to make them aware of the different medicolegal errors that they have to avoid in their routine practice.

Trainees completed a pre-test (3 multiple-choice questions (MCQ) and 4 medical malpractice cases involving pathologists), attended lectures covering standards in pathology, the legal responsibility of pathologists and the notion of medical malpractice error in pathology, brainstormed about legal cases (different than in the pre-test), participated in a conference covering telepathology, digital molecular pathology and social media and finally completed a post-test (same as the pre-test). We tried to assess the impact of the session using a questionnaire that different trainees ( who were present or absent in the training session) fulfilled one month after the training session. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted to determine whether there were significant differences between the scores among pathologists according to their level of training in the speciality.

The results indicated that performance on the post-test significantly improved on questions associated with 2 of the 4 cases.  Trainees were concordant with actual case verdicts at a rate of 38% for pre-test and 54% for post-test.  Most (76.5%) students felt they had an active role in the training and felt they achieved goals (94.1%).

The association of different methods of learning is helpful in training pathologists about medicolegal malpractice.