Teaching procedural skills to family medicine residents: Preliminary report of the Bori experience.

Introduction: Proficiency in procedural skills is a prerequisite for graduating residents in Family Medicine. The acquisition of these skills required for clinical practice remains an ongoing challenge. In order to overcome the challenge of resident doctors in Family Medicine in acquiring competence in procedural skills, rural posting was added in their curriculum.

Aim: The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of dedicated teaching of procedural skills on the residents’ performance at the end of their rural posting.

Method: A hospital based cross-sectional study in which respondents were recruited by convenient sample of all consenting residents (n = 29) from two training institutions who reported to the Bori Zonal Hospital for rural posting from 2018-2020. A questionnaire was administered to the respondents. A two sample t-test was used to compare the means and P-value of <0.05 was considered statistically significant.

Result: A total of 728 procedures were performed during the period. The most common procedure performed was caesarean section and the least was repair of vesicovaginal fistula. The mean procedural rating score at the beginning and the end of the rural posting were 1.68±0.70 and 3.94±0.64 respectively. There was a significant difference between the procedure mean scores at the beginning and end of the rural posting (t=11.91, p< 0.0001, 95% confidence interval: -2.6414 to -1.8786).

Conclusion: Given the right training in an enabling environment, the Family Medicine resident graduates proficient in the right mix of skills needed to run district Hospitals and other health institutions.