Disclosures: Athanasios Tzaras, MD: No financial relationships or conflicts of interest

Objective: Musculoskeletal education is being revisited by many medical institutions to improve the quality of information taught to students. We incorporated a musculoskeletal ultrasound workshop for medical students and evaluated the impact on their confidence in anatomy identification and procedure performance.

Design: Retrospective study Setting : Academic medical center Participants : 53 3rd year medical students

Interventions: The workshop included online documents for pre-reading and 3.5 hours of hands-on ultrasound training of the knee and shoulder, along with a review of landmark-guided injections. Students completed pre- and post-workshop self-evaluations.

Main Outcome Measures: Questions included 10-point Likert scales defining comfort with (1) identifying anatomical landmarks, (2) ultrasound imaging, and (3) landmark-guided injections.

Results: 53 students completed the curriculum, and all completed pre-and post-evaluations. A paired-sample t-test was conducted to compare survey answers provided in the pre-workshop and post-workshop self-evaluations. There was a significant difference in the scores for the post-workshop (Mean (M) = 7.3, standard deviation (SD) = 1.9) compared to the pre-workshop (M = 2.4, SD = 2.3; t (52) = -11.9, p < .01) for all categories, suggesting an increase in confidence in anatomic landmark identification, ultrasound structure identification, and landmark guided injections following the workshop. When evaluating for comfort with identification of anatomical landmarks, the Likert scale score increased by an average of 4.28, while comfort with ultrasound imaging and landmark-guided injections increased on average by 5.16 and 5.15, respectively. Conclusions: This pilot study demonstrates a statistically significant improvement in student confidence to identify clinically significant musculoskeletal landmarks, identify common structures under ultrasound, and perform landmark-guided injections. The curriculum achieves its purpose in familiarizing students with the use of point-of-care musculoskeletal ultrasound while reviewing knowledge necessary for the clinical setting. Future directions include evaluating the effects of this workshop on these students during the subsequent year to assess translatability throughout medical training.

Level of Evidence: Level III

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PM&R Meeting Abstracts - https://pmrjabstracts.org/abstract/evaluation-of-a-musculoskeletal-ultrasound-workshop-for-third-year-medical-students/