The Current Status of Risk Assessing Undergraduate Medical Electives: A UK Consensus to Inform Recommendations for Future Practice
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22024/UniKent/03/ajpp.1272Samenvatting
Background: Electives are well established in healthcare education, particularly medicine. They usually involve extended placements in the home country or across the world. The benefits are well-documented in terms of student maturation, exposure to new settings, professional development, clinical skills and so forth. The majority take place outside of the home institution. Supporting students to develop comprehensive risk assessments is crucial for their safety, and that of patients and public. The Medical Schools Council (MSC) Elective Committee, comprising elective leads from all UK medical schools, collaborate on improving electives practices and pooling expertise. As risk assessment has been a topic of debate (exacerbated by Covid) it was decided to survey members regarding their risk assessment practices, with the aim of generating a set of recommendations that UK medical school, and others, can employ as a benchmark when developing risk assessments and updating safety processes.
Method: Elective leads from 26 of 32 UK Medical Schools, shared their approaches to electives risk assessment via a mix-method questionnaire. An elected subgroup of the MSC Electives Committee collated responses in order to generate a comprehensive set of electives risk and safely recommendations. Free text additions were considered thematically.
Results: The study found variation in risk assessment approaches and inclusions as well as variation in where responsibility lies for risk assessing. Results enabled us to generate a template that can be applied flexibly and according to the individual requirements of any healthcare programme that includes an elective placement. Risk assessment items such as “local custom”, “laws”, “location safety”, “ethics and discrimination” are examples of additions which were added to the more traditional risk assessment considerations such as “travel insurance”, “communicable diseases” and “Personal Protective Equipment”.
Conclusions: It is recognised that differences in location, learning objectives, length and type of elective placement, prevents a more formalised and rigid risk assessment recommendation. However, for any medical school or other organisation undertaking risk assessment of an elective, a flexible template of recommendations is offered by this consensus paper. Replication of the study to capture post-pandemic additions would be a worthwhile exercise.
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