Abstract
Mental state examination is a set of indispensable skills to assess patients with psychiatric needs, and which is chiefly acquired in the CUHK MBChB Year 5 Psychiatry Module through lectures, readings, and bedside teaching. While the former two provide the fundamental background knowledge, visualization through observing actual patients is vital in the learning process, as mental state is multi-dimensional and highly dynamic in nature.
Bedside teaching is the linkage between book knowledge and development of skills in conducting mental state examination. Yet considering the low teacher:student ratio (typically 1:4-6), relying on bedside teaching as the only bridge is not economical and sustainable, especially under the context of increasing number (approaching 250/year) of medical students. The situation was made worse with the COVID-19, where exposure of medical students to patients, especially during the acute phase with the most disturbed mental condition, was greatly hampered.
The Department of Psychiatry owns a collection of video-recordings (>500GB of >3000 videos) of consented real patients for teaching purpose since the 1990s. The videos captured a diversified range of mental conditions and could be an ideal visualization tool complementary to bedside teaching. Systematic utilization of the collection had not been feasible in the past due to lack of explanatory notes and annotations. The current project aims at (1) Stratifying the video into categories of mental conditions; (2) Augmenting selected illustrative videos with self-explanatory annotations, voice-over and PowerPoint slides to serve as core-curriculum teaching materials in the format of online teaching videos with a broad coverage of students.
Brief write-up
Project objectives
The project addresses to the educational needs of medical students during their clinical years, where exposure to a variety of clinical conditions is needed to equip the next-generation doctors. The present project aims at developing a series of clinical teaching videos to illustrate 4 major themes in psychiatry:
1. Acute disturbance of mental state;
2. Interface of psychiatry and other clinical specialties;
3. Rare but life-threatening psychiatric conditions; &
4. Effects and side effects of psychiatric treatment.
The clinical video will be disseminated through e-platform as educational materials for self-learning for medical students at CUHK.
Activities, process and outcomes
From a collection of clinical recordings of different psychiatric syndromes, senior medical students worked in partnership with the supervisors of this project in archiving and selecting suitable recordings as teaching materials. These recordings were augmented with annotations, voice-over and PowerPoint slides and built as 8 individual teaching videos that are to be used in the Year 5 Psychiatry Module of the MBChB programme.
Deliverables and evaluation
The indexed archive of clinical recordings was completed, and 8 teaching videos were produced.
Dissemination, diffusion, impact and sharing of good practices
The 8 teaching videos will be disseminated to the prospective medical students from the academic year 2022-23 onwards during their Year 5 Psychiatry Module. The indexed archive will also be shared with the academic staff within the Department of Psychiatry.
Impact on teaching and learning
Formal evaluation to the teaching videos will be obtained from the academic year 2022-23 onwards.
