A new approach to medical education raises these questions to go beyond the traditional apprenticeship model to learning and evaluation. The performance based approach focuses on skill acquisition and demonstration under standardized conditions. The student will have acquired these skills during the six-week clerkship. These performance stations include a breast and pelvic examination on patient surrogates, preparation of wet mount slide and diagnosis of vaginal infection under the microscope, counseling of patients for vaginitis, contraception, and menopause, repair of a midline episiotomy, a demonstration of the mechanisms of labor and the hand maneuvers of a delivery, surgical instrument recognition, and knot tying. With the exception of the gynecological examination, the stations are set up in two auditoriums.
Students choose their first station then rotate to the next one when it becomes available.
The stations take about an hour and half to complete. The GTAs are paid volunteers to serve as patient surrogates for the breast and pelvic examination. They are highly trained in teaching and evaluating the essential skills of these examinations. They allow themselves to be examined, then provide direct feedback along with a trained observer after the session. The students are instructed to treat the session as a real patient encounter.