The purpose of the Geriatric Medicine Skills Fair is to familiarize 3rd-year medical students with selected screening tools and clinical assessments that are necessary to care for older adults. We find it helpful to introduce these tools in a non-clinical setting first. This allows students to receive more detailed instruction from faculty members about proper administration and interpretation than might be available in a busy clinic setting. Students also become more comfortable with these tools by practicing them in a classroom setting, before having to use them in a live clinical setting with actual patients. Our classroom didactic sessions, which reinforce knowledge about geriatric syndromes through small group case discussions, did not lend themselves well to this type of hands-on practice. By creating a separate teaching session for this purpose, all students can practice administering and scoring tools themselves, while a faculty member is observing and coaching them directly. A secondary benefit from this session is that students do indeed learn some content about the relevant geriatric syndromes, but that is not the primary purpose of this session.
We incorporate this Skills Fair session as a two-hour session during the first week of the 3rd year students' geriatric medicine block rotation. Four faculty members (or three faculty members and a Geriatric Medicine fellow) teach this session in a recurring fashion to each block rotation group.Each group consists of 15-20 students. The students are asked to evenly divide themselves among the stations which are set up as four separate tables in a large conference room. The faculty member at each station remains in place, while the students rotate every 30 minutes, so that they have been to all stations by the time the session ends. We gather feedback at the end of the session.
The four stations cover the following topics:
We first developed the Geriatric Medicine Skills Fair at the University of Kansas School of Medicine in 2005-2006. Since then it has been revised annually, based upon learner feedback and our experience with each teaching task. In 2008, we completed a significant revision of the formatting and content of the fair. We appreciate the support of the Kansas Reynolds Program in Aging for supporting faculty time to make this comprehensive revision possible. Faculty members who authored case vignettes, role playing scripts and related materials are: Dr. Shelley Bhattacharya, Dr. Lynne Kallenbach, Dr. Mary McDonald, and Dr. Sally Rigler. These faculty members, along with Dr. James Birch, Dr. Dan Swagerty, and our yearly Geriatric Medicine Fellows, administer these sessions.
We are hopeful that other institutions might find these teaching materials useful. We are pleased to post this set of Preceptor Guides, written case vignettes, role-playing scripts, and related materials so that faculty at other institutions may use this teaching approach, and any of these materials, in part or in whole. The Preceptor Guides explain how we run each teaching station at our own site, but users may wish to change the way the stations are organized or run.
Along with the case vignettes, role playing scripts and other materials, you will need copies of the assessment tools themselves. You may have copies already in your clinical sites and may wish to use those, but if not, tools such as the Geriatric Depression Screen, the Determine nutritional checklist, and the Braden scale, are readily available for download from the internet. We have found the University of Iowa's Geriatric Medicine Education website to be particularly helpful in this regard; it contains many geriatric assessment tools, with directions for their use, organized by clinical topic, and available for download. http://www.healthcare.uiowa.edu/igec/tools/default.asp
For questions and feedback, please contact either Dr. Shelley Bhattacharya at sbhattacharya@kumc.edu or Dr. Sally Rigler at srigler@kumc.edu.
©
The University of Kansas Medical Center
