Clinical Skills Day: A Novel Approach to Enhancing Procedural Skills Teaching for Foundation Year One Doctors

Background Completion of the Foundation Year One (FY1) doctor training is a requirement for full General Medical Council registration in the United Kingdom. Training during this year is mapped to a curriculum with one of the key elements being safe procedural skills. The objective of this project was to improve the teaching of procedural skills through the means of a Clinical Skills Day (CSD) and to quantify any improvement. Materials and methods A one-group pretest-posttest design was conducted on 32 doctors who completed a confidence inventory before and after four core procedural stations: suturing, urethral catheterisation (both male and female), lumbar puncture, and bimanual and speculum examinations. The intervention of simulated procedural skills occurred under the supervision of senior clinicians, with FY1 doctors receiving teaching and practising the four skills. The primary outcome was the impact of a CSD on trainees' confidence in performing certain skills. Pre- and post-CSD trainees' confidence levels were collected via an online-focused questionnaire and descriptive statistics, paired t-test, and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) with post-hoc Bonferroni comparisons were undertaken for statistical analysis. Results The difference in the mean scores of confidence post-intervention was significant in all four procedural stations with or without supervision (p <0.0001). Conclusions The use of CSDs impacted positively on the FY1 doctors' confidence in performing certain skills. Wider implementation of this promising approach for Foundation Doctors is recommended.