Impact of an Expansion of a Clinical Nutrition Curriculum on Pre-Clerkship Medical Students’ Perception of Their Knowledge and Skills Related to Performing a Nutritional Assessment

Abstract

Learning how to provide nutritional counseling to patients should start early in undergraduate medical education to improve the knowledge, comfort, and confidence of physicians. Two nutrition workshops were developed for first-year medical students. The first workshop, co-led by physicians and registered dieticians, focused on obtaining nutrition assessments. The second workshop focused on the appropriate dietary counseling of patients with chronic kidney disease and cardiovascular risk. We surveyed students before workshop 1, after workshop 1, and after workshop 2 to assess their perceptions of the value of physician nutrition knowledge and counseling skills as well as their own comfort in the area of nutritional knowledge, assessment, and counseling. We found a significant improvement in their self-assessed level of knowledge regarding counseling patients, in their comfort in completing a nutritional assessment, and in their confidence in advising a patient about nutrition by the end of the first workshop. By the time of the second workshop five months later, students continued to report a high level of knowledge, comfort, and confidence. The implementation of clinical nutrition workshops with a focus on assessment, management, and counseling was found to be effective in increasing student’s self-assessed level of knowledge as well as their confidence and comfort in advising patients on nutrition. Our findings further support the previous assertion that clinical nutrition education can be successfully integrated into the pre-clerkship medical school curriculum.