Teaching students in general practice can affect patients' blood pressure

doi:10.1136/bmj.331.7513.406-b

BMJ 2005;331:406 (13 August), doi:10.1136/bmj.331.7513.406-b

Letter

Teaching students in general practice can affect patients' blood pressure

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR—An increasing amount of medical student teachingis being based in the community, as it is becoming increasinglyrecognised that this is where most consultations take place.Benson et al report on combining quantitative and qualitativemethods in exploring the views of patients participating inteaching.¹ They start their discussion by saying that participationin teaching by general practitioners and student doctors hadno negative impact on patients.

Patients have always been an essential part of medical education,but we cannot assume that they choose to participate.^2-4 Inour randomised controlled trial in 22 teaching practices wecalculated the influence of the presence of doctors in trainingon the blood pressure of patients.⁵ We found that in teachingpractices the presence of a doctor in training had a notableeffect when an experienced general practitioner measured a patient'sblood pressure. We came to the following conclusions.

Firstly, although . . . [Full text of this article]

Jan H Matthys, vocational trainer

University of Ghent, 9000 Ghent, Belgium matthys.jan@pandora.be

CiteULike

Complore

Connotea

Del.icio.us Add to Digg

Digg

StumbleUpon Add to Technorati

Technorati What's this?

Relevant Articles

Impact on patients of expanded, general practice based, student teaching: observational and qualitative study: John Benson, Thelma Quince, Arthur Hibble, Thomas Fanshawe, and Jon Emery
BMJ 2005 331: 89. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]