Simulator Assessment of Funduscopic Skills in Three Consecutive Medical School Classes
2009, Volume 2, Number 1 Simulator Assessment of Funduscopic Skills - Mottow-Lippa 5 state-wide performance would have been even worse. Quality of patient care suffers when ocular findings pertinent to the diagnosis and management of sys-temic disease are missed. This study reaffirms the utility of a funduscopic simu-lator as an objective assessment in three successive classes at a public California medical school. Fundus-copic skills were reproducibly found to be weak. Since evaluation drives the curriculum, course direc-tors can use formal clinical examination stations to bolster their clinical skills training and work with clinical skills teams to assess acquisition and retention over time. Only then, with hard data documenting the need, will curriculum deans support restoring the oph-thalmic component to the required medical school curriculum. Multi-center participation is required and is ongo-ing to analyze larger student populations in diverse academic settings, to provide robust studies and to allow more generalizable conclusions. Further partici-pation from additional schools in these ongoing stud-ies of funduscopic simulator skills assessment, using this same protocol and a standardized grading rubric [4], is necessary and welcome, to assess effect on the different degrees of prior curricular exposure on stu-dent skill performance. Acknowledgments The authors are indebted to C. Sue Ahearn, RN for data collection and Fran Stephens for data entry. This study was supported in part by a departmental grant from Research to Prevent Blindness, Inc. NY, NY, and A Dean's Medical Education Scholar Grant from the University of California, Irvine This study was presented as a poster at the Associa-tion of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) Western Group on Educational Affairs, April 30 - Wednesday, May 3, 2006, Asilomar Conference Center, Pacific Grove, California and as an abstract podium presenta-tion at the Research in Medical Education Meeting at the Annual AAMC meeting Seattle, Washington, No-vember 1, 2006 Neither author has any proprietary commercial inter-ests related to the study. References 1. Mottow-Lippa LM, Boker J, Duke A, Amin A. A novel 3-year longi-tudinal pilot study of medical students' acquisition and reten-tion of screening eye examination skil1s. 2006;113: 133-139. [Mottow-Lippa,L, cor-rection to figure for 2006 113: 133-139. 113 (6): 984] 2. Dodaro NR and Maxwell DP. An Eye for an Eye: A Simplified Model for Teaching. June 1995; 133: 824-826 3. Mottow-Lippa L, Boker JR and Stephens F. A Prospective Study of the Longitudinal Effects of an Embedded Specialty Curriculum on Physical Examination Skills Using an Ophthalmology Model (submitted). 4. Lippa L. The Disc Mantra: An Algorithm for Fundus Description. :http:// s e r v i c e s . a a m c . o r g / j s p / m e d e d p o r t a l / retrieveSubmissionDetailById.do?subId=1086. 2008.