PG97 ‘But we know it will be normal!’ The role of simulation stethoscopes in undergraduate education

Background The current COVID-19 pandemic has caused significant challenges within medical education, particularly with regards to the use of volunteer patients for clinical examination teaching sessions given their potential vulnerability and susceptibility to infection. As a result, we have been looking for novel ways to deliver clinical examination skills teaching that does not require contact with patients, but can still help students to develop these essential skills and improve their recognition of ‘abnormal’ as well as ‘normal’ findings. Recently, high fidelity simulation stethoscopes have been developed that can be used with both mannequins and healthy individuals to simulate a wide variety of heart and lung sounds.1 These stethoscopes have the look of their normal counterparts, can be controlled wirelessly by the tutor and only transmit sound when placed onto a mannequin or body, helping to improve the fidelity of the simulation.2 Summary of Work As part of our clinical examination skills teaching for third year undergraduate medical students during the COVID-19 pandemic, we have decided to utilise simulation stethoscopes as part of a simulated patient encounter. Rather than risk exposing potentially vulnerable patients, students will take a standard history over the telephone and we will then use the stethoscopes to simulate carefully linked examination findings on a mannequin or healthy volunteer. We will pilot this approach on 8 September 2020 with 16 undergraduate medical students. Each student will be given two scenarios which will focus on cardio-respiratory examination skills and will involve a mixture of both ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ simulated examination findings. Students and tutors will complete pre- and post-session questionnaires to assess the impact of this approach on students’ confidence with regards to cardio-respiratory examination and recognition of ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ findings. Summary of Results Results will be available for presentation at the conference, pending the initial session on 8 September 2020. Discussion and Conclusions We hope to establish whether the use of simulation stethoscopes in this way may be a valuable approach to undergraduate medical student clinical examination teaching. Conclusions will be based on both qualitative and quantitative data collected from student and tutor questionnaires after the initial session. Recommendations Depending on the findings, this approach may prove a useful adjunct to undergraduate clinical examination skills teaching, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. References Warrington SJ, Beeson MS, Fire FL. Are simulation stethoscopes a useful adjunct for emergency residents’ training on high-fidelity mannequins?West J Emerg Med 2013;14:275–277. iSimulate. AURiS: A Simulation Stethoscope with Advanced Sensor Technology [Internet]. 2020 [cited 2020 Aug 30]. Available from: https://www.isimulate.com/auris