Clinical Skills Lab – Learn the Entire Setup & Benefits

Teaching basic clinical skills to medical students has gone tricky because of less access to in-patients. In a traditional manner, clinical skills are applied to patients under the guidance of more trained practitioners.

Recently, health care trends in the world have switched toward outpatient management from patient care. Because of that, teaching hospitals do not have enough inpatients for making students learn things. Some clinical skills are not appropriate for teaching in the setting done for the outpatient. With many inpatients even in a hospital, which is the best environment for clinical teaching, it becomes difficult to look for appropriate patients for bedside teaching.

Teaching complex medical procedures such as blood draw, intravenous catheter placement, lumbar puncture, and endotracheal intubation can cause pain to patients. Trying hands on a few skills such as pelvic examination, male genital examination as well as female breast examinations can also result in psychological and physical distress.

Physical indications such as various heart murmur, abnormal breath sounds, and dislocated hip, may not be immediately available for providing lessons. Reports have explained teaching these kinds of skills in limited settings on manikins, but manikins have not been used by any studies on a large scale to teach clinical skills in the third-year clerkship as a part of an integrated curriculum.

Factors Affecting the Development of Clinical Skills Lab

The evolution in the ways of teaching and learning, the revolutionary changes in the delivery of health care and the quick development of technology dared the formerly used way of clinical skills development and resulted in the establishment of clinical skills laboratories (CSLs) in many medical and nursing schools for the medical education.

So to get away with such issues, Clinical Skills Laboratories and many programmes were developed to improve the clinical skills and their application to solving clinical difficulties of all the medical students.

The students were made to practise and learn clinical skills in a stepwise and structured procedure in small groups on manikins, standardized patients, models and many more in CSL. They also got to learn to react to clinical emergencies and practise their learnings to solve them by simulations.

Students meet their learning objectives when they are guided by the clinical skill demonstrators (facilitator). Skill performance and small group demonstration enable an objective assessment of skill acquisition and precision in the monitoring of students.

Setup of Clinical Skills Lab

To set up a clinical skill lab, it is necessary to take help from the modern educational theory in the formation and delivery of the facility. For CSLs, the development of communication skills is an important area to focus on. As a matter of fact, another name for those laboratories would be clinical and communication skills lab units or centres, as the suitable application of clinical skills needs the integration of both communication skills and technical clinical skills.

Clinical skills laboratories may consist of many small side rooms for interviews and a huge open space for seminars. It may include several varieties of clinical settings such as procedural skill rooms, accident and emergency cubicles, a place for simulators, general practice consulting rooms, and an Intensive Care Unit.

Offices for support staff and teachers and storage areas are also imperative. It is also crucial for the space that is available to be kept fluid for anticipated rearrangement to suit any particular lesson. Moreover, a clinical skills lab should give a sense of a natural clinical environment.

Advantages of Clinical Skills Labs

Clinical skills labs can come in handy for multi-professional education and teamwork. It gives the students access to learn with new opportunities in a protected and safe environment. Bridging the gap between the clinical setting and classroom reduces students’ anxiety levels.

The advanced educational strategies and learning procedures are difficult to apply in the traditional process using bedside teaching and are, thus, best practised in the CSLs.

Students’ way of conduct and essential communication skills can be enhanced by imbibing these skills into the comprehensive clinical skills program.

One of the most crucial advantages of CSLs is that by imbibing them into the theoretical portions of the curriculum, skills are mastered within their suitable context. Information technology and computer-assisted learning can be used in CSLs to improve the interaction between practice and theory.

Objective structured clinical examination (OSCE), can also be carried out at the clinical skills learning labs and it is becoming an ideal method of evaluating the skills.

Thus, by all these advantages, we can see that CSLs give the ideal environment for the evaluation of medical skills acquisition.

To learn and establish a more specific protocol based and scientific skills lab, contact SEM Trainers & Systems at sem@semtrainervalsaders.com or call +91 88495 63724 for all your needs.

Sem Trainers & Systems