Contribution of an Early Internal Medicine Rotation to the Clinical Reasoning Learning for Young Residents

Abstract

Clinical reasoning is the cornerstone of medical practice, and achieving this competence depends on a large number of factors. Internal medicine departments provide junior doctors with plentiful and varied patients, offering a comprehensive basis for learning clinical reasoning. In order to evaluate the usefulness of an early rotation at internal medicine departments, we compared, via script concordance tests, the evolution of residents’ clinical reasoning after an initial internal medicine rotation compared to rotations through other medical specialties. Twenty-two residents were tested after six months of their internal medicine rotation and compared to twenty-five residents that had the first rotation in another specialty (control). We showed a significant difference in the improvement of the script concordance tests scores (p=0.015) between the beginning and the end of their first rotation between the internal medicine and the control groups, and this implies the lower improvement of clinical reasoning skills and spontaneous learning slope of the junior doctors in other departments.