Clinical Chemistry Education for Medical Students

Clinical chemistry plays an important role in medical practice. Approximately 60% to 70% of medical decisions rely on laboratory test results, justifying the need for physicians to have sufficient knowledge of clinical chemistry. However, recent studies have shown that medical students’ knowledge of clinical chemistry is inadequate, and many are unable to interpret the meaning of laboratory parameter results. This implies that the study of clinical chemistry in the curriculum is currently insufficient. There are several related problems, namely a lack of a formal or structured clinical chemistry curriculum, limited time allocated for these studies, a lack of teaching experts and the failure of stakeholders to acknowledge the importance of clinical chemistry. This review discusses problems in the current clinical chemistry education of medical students and provides solutions. A structured search strategy in PubMed and Google Scholar for publications in English was applied using the search terms “clinical chemistry”, “clinical pathology”, “laboratory” and “laboratory medicine” in combination with one of the following keywords: “education”, “medical student”, “curriculum”, “guideline”, “undergraduate”, “medical school” and “training”. The extracted literature focused on research studies, review articles and meta-analyses. Background information and details about the current status of clinical chemistry/ laboratory medicine education were extracted from review articles, while research articles were used to analyse and evaluate the current conditions in the medical schools regarding clinical chemistry/ laboratory medicine education.