McGovern students start clinical skills society
A pair of second-year McGovern Medical School students have created a new organization, the Student Clinical Skills Society, designed to give students more opportunities to learn valuable clinical skills throughout their medical school journey.
Created by Zachary Terrell and Miles Gibson, the Student Clinical Skills Society is a way for students to gain extra practice in skills sessions that may interest them and the particular specialty they may pursue.
“The idea for this organization was basically formed out of impatience,” Terrell said. “Miles and I really enjoy learning about clinical skills: learning to suture, learning to intubate, those sorts of things. That’s something McGovern does a great job of. We have a lot of skills sessions within our course work, beginning in the MS1 year, but we want to give students a conduit to learn and practice more at a faster rate.”
Terrell and Gibson knew that the clinical skills center existed, but there was not an easy way for students to access the resource unless it was through an organization. For instance, interest groups for anesthesia and surgery organizations hold various sessions for skills pertaining to their specialties.
“It’s hard to find out about those opportunities if you aren’t in that organization,” Terrell said. “We thought there should be one place where you could go to learn multiple clinical skills. We wanted to start an organization where our only goal was, once a month or so, to give students an opportunity to learn and practice a new clinical skill, taught by the physicians at McGovern Medical School and Memorial Hermann.”
Terrell and Gibson began reaching out to doctors they had shadowed and faculty they had learned from throughout the Medical School. Almost immediately, faculty began offering their time to do clinical skills workshops.
“My biggest worry was not having enough connections within the hospital and faculty who would be willing to give up hours of their day to come teach skills,” Terrell said. “I thought the hardest part of running this organization would be finding teachers, but everybody we reached out to has been more than excited to teach the students. I think that says a lot about the faculty here at McGovern and the doctors at Memorial Hermann.”
The enthusiasm of the faculty to teach the sessions was met equally by the enthusiasm of the students interested in learning each skill. The organization had more than 200 students sign up for the email list to become part of the organization, with more than 100 interested in the first workshop.
“I love the response,” Terrell said. “It hurts that we can’t offer it to all students, that’s just the nature of this sort of thing when we are limited to 40 spots in the Surgical and Clinical Skills Center, but the response has been great. Hopefully, the more skill sessions we have, the more opportunities we can offer to all the students.”
The Student Clinical Skills Society held its first session Aug. 31, 2022, with an airway workshop, and will hold a lumbar puncture workshop in September. Future sessions have not yet been scheduled, but Terrell says the organization has plenty of ideas for the rest of the year and beyond.
“I have a lot of big plans for the organization,” Terrell said. “I hope for it to become sort of part of the curriculum. Never really required, but for it to be there and be advertised by the school to the students.
“If you’re in the hospital and shadowing, here’s this organization where you can go learn skills that correlate to your area of interest. I want that to be there for all the students. I want to offer enough so that if somebody is interested, they can come in and learn.”
Students interested in joining the Student Clinical Skills Society can visit the organization’s Instagram page @McGovernSCSS. On the Instagram page, students can access a form to join the email list. Emails are sent out monthly with the announcement and a sign-up sheet for the next skills session.