What do parents think about their children being involved in medical education?

摘要

Editor-Many of our students express concern during their paediatric attachment about interviewing and examining children. In particular, they feel they may not know how to talk to or handle the child and that they may intrude on the family at a sensitive time. We wondered how parents viewed medical student visits - if, as for adult patients, the experience was beneficial, or if the parents were similarly apprehensive about seeing students. We designed an anonymised questionnaire collecting information about the child and his or her illness. Parental attitudes to students and medical education were examined with a mixture of numeric scores and free text. This was distributed to 127 parents of acute and elective paediatric inpatients in a teaching hospital. A total of 105 (83%) completed questionnaires were returned.