Teaching and learning clinical skills : mastering the art of medicine

For doctors, carrying out physical examination is an important tool to establish a diagnosis. The medical study programme therefore gives much attention to this essential skill. This dissertation studied in which way medical students learn best to conduct a good and complete physical examination. In the first years of the programme, the students appear to require structured training by teachers who don’t just teach them the correct manipulations, but increasingly also the corresponding findings and possible clinical pictures. In later years, when students do hospital internships, it turns out that the degree of support and guidance by doctors is often insufficient. Nonetheless, students learn a lot because they are given the responsibility to independently conduct physical examination on patients and learn to recognize abnormal findings in practice.