Understanding of Medical Students' Information Needs in Emergency Cases: The Implications for Emergency Management in Teaching Hospitals of Iran

Dear Editor, The practice of emergency medicine is the ability to perform indicated clinical procedures in a skillful and safe manner. 1,2 Due to multiple factors, including the unpredictable nature of emergency medicine, clinical experience may be quite variable. So clinical experience in the emergency department (ED) is the foundation of emergency medicine. 3-6 In teaching hospitals, clinical encounter is an increasing significant component of medical students' curriculum 7,8 and one of the clinical experiences of medical students is emergency medicine. 9,10 Thus, all students who are graduated from medical schools should be capable of handling emergency situations. 11,12 While the clinical encounter is understood to be a significant educational experience, little is known about the information of medical students in response to clinical problems, specially in emergency cases. To date, many studies address physicians' information needs but few authors report studies describing medical students' information needs in the ED. The present study aims at analyzing the information needs of medical students in emergency departments which differs from most of the past studies by focusing on the information needs of students, rather than those of clini-cians. This study seeks to provide a better understanding of students' information needs and analyzes the content of questions of medical students in response to a clinical encounter that can impact on the clinical education quality , the recognition of students' educational needs, and the educational improvement in emergency and better management of patients by medical students that decreases patient's stay and promotes patient's satisfaction. The information needs of medical students in the emergency departments are evaluated at teaching hospitals in Iran University of Medical Sciences. A questionnaire was used. During observations, questions were asked by the medical students. In the questionnaire , following the review of the literature, a survey instrument was developed including 17 questions primarily related to the medical students' de-mographics data, and rate of information needs. Two sets of categories were developed to classify: 1) The content of the information needs recorded as questions and 2) the information need rate. The categori-zation of students' questions was based on the content of each question; such as diagnosis, treatment and organization. The categorization of information need rate was based on little, moderate and high. Seventy medical students participated in the study while 45 (64%) were male. 350 questions were noted during our observations. 147 (42%) questions pertained to diagnosing the patient's problem. Organizational …