Do outreach placements affect the quality of students' hospital-based work?

Dental schools' students increasingly learn on outreach placements away from the dental hospital. These experiences may affect the quality of students' hospital-based clinical work. Objective: Pilot study to compare the quality of students' clinical work before and after outreach placement. Design: Uncontrolled pre-test, post-test comparison of routine formative assessments of students' clinical work and patient management in the dental hospital. Method: Second-year Hygiene and Therapy students from the University of Sheffield's School of Clinical Dentistry undertook outreach placements for three days each week over ten weeks. Students mostly worked in pairs nursing for one another. The grades for students' last five restorative procedures before placements started and the first five after placement completion were extracted from archived records. Results: There were seven students in this pilot cohort. For clinical ability the mean measure was 59.7%(SD=4.1) at pre-test and 62.4%(SD=2.8) at post-test, p=0.13. For patient management the corresponding values were 63.3%(SD=3.0) and 64.0%(SD=1.5), p=0.52. Conclusion: The quality of students' hospital-based clinical work was similar before and after attending their hospital-based clinical for outreach placements. These data give an indication of the samples required to formally test the effect of outreach on clinical grades. The study's design does not differentiate between the effects of the outreach placements and concurrent school and hospital-based learning experiences and maturation.