Medical Student's Benefit Rates from the Clinical Teaching Rounds and Its Associated Factors in Tehran University of Medical Sciences in the Year 2010

Among the various methods of clinical teaching, rounds and grand rounds are considered as the gold standards. Clinical round includes some standard components and it plays an effective role in student''s learning process. The aim of this study was to evaluate the content of teaching rounds in 40 clinical wards in 4 medical teaching hospitals affiliated to Tehran University of Medical Sciences in Tehran, Iran, and also to assess the learners benefit rate from these programs and determine the factors affecting those. This is a cross sectional, descriptive and analytical study conducted on 318 medical learners in different grades, about the content of clinical rounds. The data collection tool was a questionnaire made by researchers. The validity of the questionnaire according to experts opinions and the reliability with a pilot study conducted on 30 cases were confirmed (α=0.826). Data entered into the SPSS software and for analysis Chi-square, Student’s t-test, ANOVA and linear regression analysis tests were used. In this study 20 subjects related to clinical rounds content were assessed. The highest score was related to the subject of diagnosis and the lowest one was related to legal issues. Overall, the mean score of the learner''s benefit rate to this method was 3.52 out of five. The level of learner''s benefit rate was above the average and the benefit rates according to educational grade, number of the students and faculties were significantly different (P<0.05). Average of the benefit rate among residents were significantly higher than the other medical trainees (P<0.05). In conclusion, in understudied clinical rounds, there has been more emphasized on history taking, clinical examinations and diagnosis subjects, and Issues like: accountability, health economy, patient''s nutrition, non-drug treatments and medical legal issues are less considered in the studied rounds.