Experience before learning is a requirement in many fields of practice like primary health care and community nursing. However, in the medical field, experience before learning is not very significant although the article supports this very approach.
It is futile to practice without knowledge because one will have the skills but without the rationale behind the acquired skills he or she will be doing things just for the sake of doing them. On the other hand, a person with knowledge is very competent during the practice because they have a rationale for whatever they do. For instance, someone with experience on intramuscular administration of medication is perfect in practice but since he or she does not know the rationale, they may want to be adventurous and give it subcutaneously. This is hazardous to the patient as it can cause cardiac arrest.
I do not concur with the conclusion that early experience help medical students learn. I prefer a longitudinal interview of the medical professionals because they have first hand information. Moreover, the interview of other health care professionals who are not in the medical field created some error in the results because medical education is different from other fields.
As much as experience before learning results into free interaction between the students and the community, I also believe that it is possible for students who start with theory before the clinical practice to interact freely. This is because lecturers can teach them about communication strategy skills and after they practice those strategies, they become competent.
Respect needs to be prevalent in a therapeutic relationship because it facilitates comprehensive management of the patients. Unfortunately, most of the health care professionals do not treat patients with integrity leading to substandard management. Therefore, a teaching about respect is mandatory so that every health care practitioner including the students know how to treat patients with autonomy.
Respect facilitates a therapeutic environment where a patient opens up and, as a result, all his or her problems are addressed. Therefore, health care professionals should have the habit of respect so that they can fully interact with the patients as they involve them in a decision-making process. Additionally, students always ape their teachers’ actions and in case the teacher does something wrong, the students imitate it. It is therefore important for the health care practitioners to be role models by respecting both the patients and the people they work with.
It is important for health care professionals to reflect upon their actions so that they can know whether they are treating patients with integrity. Besides, students need to know how to communicate with patients and, what is more important, how to respect patients. Furthermore, I feel that students should always have a discussion after a clinical experience so that they evaluate their actions as they learn from each other. This will enable them to respect each other and the same respect will extend to the patients.
Surgical skills training are aspects that need emphasis in the medical training course because they result in creation of competent surgeons. The training has posed a great challenge to both the learner and the tutors and, therefore, improvement is necessary. For instance, a combination of theory with practical followed by demonstration on a cadaver is an excellent approach. Besides, the Learner can also view videos of the operation prior to the procedure itself. The above approaches will assist the learner to acquire the necessary skills and the surgical procedure will be easier.
Students should focus on quality practice. This means that every medical student should strive to know how to carry out an operation by being actively involved in the operation procedure. They need not to concentrate on the number of procedures to perform but to have a focus on the quality of the operation.
Although evaluation gives students the psyche to work hard, grading is vanity because every surgeon will eventually know how to perform a surgical procedure regardless of the acquired skills. I propose an individual evaluation method because each student has a different learning capacity.