82 Bringing clinical medical education on a paperless journey: making every patient contact count

Introduction Hospital based medical education is the pivotal point of knowledge and skills transfer to our medical students, who, not before long will join us as colleagues on the wards. St. James’s hospital in Dublin 8 is the biggest teaching university hospital in Dublin and home to 1,010 acute patient hospital beds. 1 2 Early and effective contact to the clinical world is important in motivating and stimulating medical student interest in clinical work, which is why having access to difficult patient cases of interest is so important in ensuring knowledge acquisition at an early stage in clinical teaching. 3 Making every patient contact count towards education regardless of where they are seen within the hospital system using electronic patient record (EPR) is vital for a more holistic approach to clinical teaching. 4 Aims To make every patient contact count as a valuable teaching resource. To give NCHD’s the opportunity to identify patient cases with interesting signs in any clinical setting and make it easily available to the lecturing staff. Current practice Teaching staff and NCHD’s flag patients with interesting signs on wards for teaching purposes using patient lists and waiting lists.This is very time consuming and can be facilitated by creating a better electronic function that all staff can use. Planned future practice and design Electronic patient record (EPR) is the current system being used to capture patient information in St. James’s hospital and is being used in all specialties in different levels. Design encompassed an easily accessible tab for physicians to comment on the reason for patient case inclusion, the sign and symptoms of interest, what kind of contact is the patient was willing to facilitate and if the patient is willing to take part in clinical exams. Outcomes anticipated A higher yield of specific patient cases can be accumulated to facilitate teaching in a more organised fashion. Lecturing staff will have easy access to specific patient cases that can augment their teaching and learning outcomes for specific teaching seminars without looking though numerous patient lists. Next step forward Ensure all NCHD’s are aware of the new medical education electronic function built into EPR at induction in July. Monitor number of NCHD’s contributing to it and feedback during ground rounds on the type of cases and numbers that have been submitted, to allow teams to see progression in case load contribution. Audit lecturers experience with new system. References St. James’s Hospital annule report. HSE. HSE service report. Dornan T, Littlewood S, Margolis SA, Scherpbier A, Spencer J, Ypinazar V. How can experience in clinical and community settings contribute to early medical education? A BEME systematic review. Medical Teacher 2006;28(1):3-18. Project Oak.