Private Hospital Anesthesia Rotation in A Rural Clinical School: A Pilot Study of Medical Students' Perceptions of...

Clinical exposure to anesthesia in rural undergraduate medical training is often limited. Therefore, a private hospital anesthesia rotation was implemented to maintain and enhance perioperative learning in rural clinical schools.

Anesthesia rotation was established at a regional private hospital, incorporating one-to-one supervision by a consultant anesthetist. This was intentionally aligned with the principles of cognitive apprenticeship and situated learning, emphasizing learning through guided participation, observation, and direct engagement in authentic clinical tasks. Students observed perioperative care, airway management, anesthetic planning, and intraoperative decision-making. The program evaluation used anonymous questionnaires. Likert-type scale responses were analyzed using descriptive statistics and grouped across thematic educational domains.

Seven out of eight participants completed the questionnaire (87.5%). The mean score across all survey items (4.7 out of 5; SD = 0.3) indicated consistently positive responses among participants. Overall agreement across survey items was 92%. Students reported clear agreement across domains related to supervision, learning environment, and clinical learning. Only one neutral response occurred in the domain "assessing increased interest in anesthesia as a career".

By enhancing students' learning experiences and clinical exposure within a rural setting, initiatives such as this may strengthen rural medical education. Although this study did not assess career intentions or workforce outcomes, positive learning experiences may influence future rural practice decisions. Larger multicenter studies using objective educational outcomes across multiple training sites are needed to evaluate the effectiveness, generalizability, and reproducibility of this model and its potential influence on future rural practice.