Near-peers effectively teach clinical documentation skills to early medical students

Composing the History of Present Illness (HPI), a key component of medical communication, requires critical thinking. Small group learning strategies have demonstrated superior effectiveness at developing critical thinking skills. Finding sufficient faculty facilitators for small groups remains a major gap in implementing these sessions. We hypothesized that "near-peer" teachers could effectively teach HPI documentation skills and fill the gap of small group facilitators. Here, we present a head-to-head comparison of near-peer and faculty teaching outcomes.

Second-year medical students in a single institution participated in an HPI Workshop as a clinical skills course requirement. Students were randomly assigned a near-peer or faculty facilitator for the workshop. We compared mean facilitator evaluation scores and performance assessments of students assigned to either type of facilitator.

Three hundred sixty-five students, 29 residents (near-peers) and 16 faculty participated. On post-session evaluations (5-point Likert scale), students ranked near-peer facilitators higher than faculty facilitators on encouraging participation and achieving the goals of the session (residents 4.9, faculty 4.8), demonstrating small, statistically significant differences between groups. Mean scores on written assessments after the workshop did not differ between the groups (29.3/30 for a written H&P and 9/10 for an HPI exam question).

Near-peer facilitators were as effective as faculty facilitators for the HPI Workshop. Utilizing near-peers to teach HPI documentation skills provided teaching experiences for residents and increased the pool of available facilitators.