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Clinical Skills Learning Through Medical Students’ Lenses, During and After a Pandemic – A Qualitative Study Cover

Clinical Skills Learning Through Medical Students’ Lenses, During and After a Pandemic – A Qualitative Study

Open Access
|Feb 2025

Figures & Tables

Overview of themes

Themes titlesThemes definitionsSubthemes
1. Acquiring clinical skills during pandemic timesThis theme focuses on more than one level. It starts with picturing how semiology training took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, while shifting afterwards towards analysing the impact that remote learning had over students, both on the short and on the long terms. Later on, a focus is placed on the measures that students adopted in order to fill in the gaps that appeared due to the lack of practice, as well as on students’ opinions and attitudes in regard to their current level of knowledge.
  • 1.1. The actual way the internship was carried out

  • 1.2. Major impacts

  • 1.3. Overcoming the difficulties

  • 1.4. Acknowledging and dealing with the place you are

2. Students’ perception about semiologyThis theme explores the degree of importance that students assign to semiology nowadays, in order to understand the grounds on which the lack of practice during pandemic rooted.
3. Mapping the role of online learning in medicineThis theme evaluates not only the downsides of remote learning in medical school, but also its pros, in an attempt to examine if online learning may be implemented in a medical academic environment.
4. Future perspectives for a better semiology learningThis theme explores future directions and actions that may be implemented so that semiology courses and trainings will make students to be more attentive, and also gain better clinical skills.

Interview topic guide

1. What year of study are you in, and which specialty do you wish to choose after the residency examination?
2. How important do you consider semiology to be in your current practice? How about, in general, as you imagine your future practice as a clinician, when it comes to establishing a patient’s diagnosis?
3. What is your opinion about online learning in general? How about learning semiology online?
4. How did your semiology internship take place?
5. How sure on yourself are you when it comes to your semiology knowledge and clinical skills (anamnesis and clinical examination)?
6. Do you consider to be a discrepancy between you and your colleagues when it comes about your semiology notions and skills?
7. What about your colleagues who learned semiology before or after the COVID-19 pandemic? Do you consider that you have been disadvantaged?
8. Do you consider that you managed to overcome your lack of clinical skills or knowledge regarding anamnesis during the following years of university?
9. Do you consider that it is necessary to overcome this lack of practice in the future? How do you intend to do it? (in case they feel uncertain about their current knowledge and clinical skills).
10. In your opinion, how should the semiology internship have taken place?
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/rjim-2025-0002 | Journal eISSN: 2501-062X | Journal ISSN: 1220-4749
Language: English
Page range: 163 - 174
Submitted on: Jan 2, 2025
Published on: Feb 27, 2025
Published by: N.G. Lupu Internal Medicine Foundation
In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services
Publication frequency: 4 issues per year

© 2025 Laura Elena Marin, Andreea Maila Măgdălin, Cristian Băicuș, published by N.G. Lupu Internal Medicine Foundation
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.