Strengthening the component of obtaining feedback from patients and using the same to facilitate the teaching of medical students

Abstract

The process of assessment and delivering feedback to the medical students has been acknowledged as the key aspects to ensure comprehensive professional development. This calls for the need to utilize every learning opportunity and provide students with some form of constructive feedback for aiding them to attain the learning competencies. The exposure or interaction with patients plays an important role in helping the medical students establish linkage between theoretical knowledge and clinical practice and understands the practical relevance of the learned topics. Feedback received from patients can prove to be a significant add-on and help students to ascertain what has been done well and which area needs improvement. To conclude, patients are an important stakeholder and, apart from contributing to the advancement of medicine, can also help medical students learn various skills through both formal and informal ways. The need of the hour is to actively involve patients in the process of clinical teaching and make students learn medicine from the beneficiary perspective.