Designing, Conducting, and Assessment of Early Clinical Exposure Course for Practicing Professionalism and Communication Skills

Introduction: Early clinical exposure is a learning strategy, which can expose medical students during their first year of education with clinical environment. In view of this, this study has been carried out a different kind of early clinical exposure to practice medical professionalism. Methods: This study was a development study that was conducted in the academic years 2017-2018. Initially, needs assessment was performed based on literature review and expert panel. Then, the design of early exposure was depicted through a focus-group interview with the presence of Olympiad students. After that, the program was implemented. The topics were presented individually in the workshop and audio podcasts were presented in the Learning Management System. In the second practical round, namely early clinical exposure, the students were divided into multiple groups and practiced communication skills and professionalism in the clinical contexts by a tutor who was in higher level of education. To evaluate this program, satisfaction forms were employed to assess the students' learning through multiple-choice and descriptive tests. Results: In the evaluation, great level of the students' satisfaction was about the selected environments, the educational program (78.1%), the employed methods of the course (73.2%) and recognition of professional responsibilities (73.2%). The least level of the students' satisfaction was the amount of learning opportunities (65.8%). 75.6% of students acknowledged the increase in their professionalism. Conclusion: Early clinical exposure is a rich opportunity for enhancing professionalism and communication skills for medical students who are in the introductory level of medical education. This way, repeating the outcomes of this study in experimental and clinical trials is recommended. Early clinical exposure should be followed seriously for long-term as well