The Use of Diabetes Educational Videos for Enhancing Medical Student Volunteers’ Patient Education Skills at a Student-Run Clinic

Introduction.JayDoc Diabetes Night is a free student-run clinic at Kansas University School of Medicine, treating underserved patients with diabetes in Wyandotte County, Kansas.Medical students are heavily involved in patient education, which is limited by their preexisting knowledge of diabetes. Methods.To improve the quality of education provided, volunteers watched short videos on the following topics: how insulin functions in the body, injecting insulin, storing insulin, using a glucometer, and finding past blood glucose values on a glucometer.Students were surveyed using Likert scales assessing their comfortability educating patients on each topic before and after watching the videos.Results.Using Wilcoxon Signed-rank tests, we found that students felt significantly more knowledgeable on all five topics after watching the videos.The largest improvement was seen in comfortability finding past values on a glucometer with an average difference of 1.91, nearly two levels of confidence on a Likert scale.Educational videos on critical tasks, such as injecting and storing insulin, improved comfortability of students by an average of 1.6 and 1.62 respectively.According to students, videos on how insulin functions in the body (11/39 responses) and insulin injection (7/39 responses) were most often discussed during patient encounters.Conclusions.These results demonstrate the efficacy of brief education on key topics in increasing students' comfortability in patient education.We suggest that student-run specialty clinics can increase student knowledge by employing similar interventions.Further research may explore the effect of this intervention on patient education, compliance, and long-term outcomes.