The Use of the Analytic Hierarchy Process Approach in Prioritizing Clinical Education Problems from the Perspective of Clinical Teachers and Medical Education Experts

The quality of clinical education is one of the important factors to improve clinical skills. Evidence shows that clinical education is replete with many challenges and attempt to tackle these challenges is priorities of medical education experts. This study endeavored to use the Analytic Hierarchy Process to rank order the challenges of clinical medical education from the perspective of clinical teachers and medical education experts.

In this descriptive cross-sectional study, 40 participants (32 clinical teachers and 8 medical education experts) were selected through convenience sampling. In the first phase, the challenges of clinical education were identified, screened, and prioritized using comprehensive searches. In the second phase, Analytic Hierarchy Process was done and the important problems were identified.

Comprehensive literature review led to the identification of 47 challenges. The preliminary screening eliminated 17 challenges and 30 challenges were ranked ordered by medical education experts. Data analysis showed that lack of student motivation (7.82±2.45), simultaneous working round and teaching round (7.79±2.20), and inappropriate evaluation methods (7.49±2.45) were the important challenges. In the second phase, 32 medical teachers prioritized the final challenges. AHP analysis showed that the presence of too many students in rounds (weight: 0.248), confined educational spaces (weight: 0.183), and lack of job motivation (weight: 0.103) were considered the most critical challenges.  

Ongoing improvement of the quality of clinical education depends on the identification of clinical problems by the use of scientific methods to do corrective actions. Planning to manage crowded clinical rounds is one of the important priorities of medical universities.