Daniela Ibañez, Alan Chiem, Cristina Ghiani, James Lister, William Shyy, Katie Thornber, Elena Stark, and TMEP Students

The Training in Medical Education and Practice is an eight-month Discovery course that prepares students to become peer educators in the anatomical sciences and point-of-care ultrasonography (POCUS). In 2023-24, 16 MS3 students worked with multi-professional faculty on average four days per week towards this goal. The course curriculum integrated the anatomical sciences with POCUS, and featured dissection, interactive didactics using platforms like Kahoot, simulation, and hands-on practice with standardized patients. Students were also loaned handheld ultrasound machines and asked to continue independent practice by obtaining a POCUS portfolio. This portfolio was archived in a cloud-based system and reviewed by course faculty, who provided feedback.

Topics for the curriculum were synchronized to the Foundations of Practice and Scientific Foundations of Medicine curriculum. This allowed TMEP students to serve as small group instructors for FoP and SFM sessions that involved anatomy and POCUS on a monthly basis. For example, students prepared for the Cardio block in January by revisiting cardiac anatomy, learning and practice echocardiography in December. TMEP students were able to further enhance their learning by serving as peer educators for cardiac anatomy and POCUS sessions in January.

Overall, preliminary surveys indicate that TMEP students rated the course as excellent, with high confidence in the ability of the TMEP curriculum to prepare them as peer educators. In addition, TMEP students strongly agreed that TMEP helped them to further explore and refine their career goals in medicine.