167 - Therapy Services Workshop Advancing Clinical Education for Medical Students

Objectives: Exposure to the clinical utility and education of physical therapy (PT), occupational therapy (OT), and speech-language pathology (SLP) is limited in undergraduate medical education. Identifying the scopes of practice of these healthcare professionals and referral indications should be introduced early to help future physicians provide appropriate and holistic patient care. Many medical students and physicians are only introduced to these services during clinical exposure. Researchers in this study created a one hour workshop to educate medical students on the roles of different therapy services and completed pre- and post-workshop assessments to assess student knowledge.

Design: Participants completed a one hour workshop with three twenty minute rotations with PTs, OTs, and SLPs. The PT rotation included information on: wheelchair fitting, patient transfer technique, physical therapy scope of practice, and interactive demonstration of transfer technique. The OT rotation included: indications of OT referral, common therapies for clinical diagnosis of stroke, and an interactive activity of PT and OT combination therapy. The SLP rotation included: indications for swallow study, cognitive assessment, and interactive sampling of thickened liquids. A survey of 11 questions, utilizing a Likert scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree), was developed to assess student knowledge. PT, OT, and SLP roles and principles were assessed on three domains each with two general patient care questions.

Results: There was a statistically significant pre- to post-survey increase in medical student awareness and knowledge across PT, OT, and SLP domains for transfer technique (1.88 to 4.36, p < 0.001), identification of diets (1.81 to 4.55, p < 0.001), and ability to list activities of daily living (2.94 to 4.55, p = 0.002). Full results will be presented if accepted.

Conclusions: From this preliminary study, we proposed this workshop outline as a scalable template to increase student knowledge of rehabilitation services and promote clinical skills development.