ArticleBMC medical education2024
Plant a seed series: the impact of an online outreach package on school pupils' knowledge, skills, and attitudes to medicine.
Article in BMC medical education, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Hello healthcare: evaluating the impact of a healthcare conference for secondary school pupils.BMC medical education · 2025Article
- Barriers and Facilitators in the Admission of Underrepresented Groups to Medical School: A Scoping Review.Perspectives on medical education · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundMedicine is one of the most inaccessible professions in the United Kingdom (UK). The Plant a Seed (PAS) series was created to address this; it is an online pre-recorded three-part video series to "Inspire", "Educate" and "Motivate" pupils from widening participation backgrounds on Medicine. We explored the impact of PAS on pupils' knowledge, skills and attitude to Medicine.
methodsWe conducted a national pretest-posttest study of Years 7-9 pupils in the UK. 503 schools were invited to PAS, following ethics approval. Consented pupils viewed all three episodes asynchronously and completed a pre-and post-series Likert scale confidence questionnaire, which evaluated their knowledge, skills and attitudes to a medical career. A Shapiro-Wilk test showed the lack of a normal distribution (p < 0.05); therefore, a Wilcoxon signed-rank test statistically compared pretest-posttest results of each pupil.
results70 pupils in Years 7-9 from 2 schools participated in this study. PAS was shown to significantly increase pupils' knowledge of the role and life of a doctor, medicine as a degree, admissions requirements, and careers in medicine (p < 0.05). There was a significant increase in pupils believing they could study medicine. The intervention did not significantly increase the desire for pupils to study medicine (p = 0.187).
conclusionPAS significantly improved pupils' knowledge, skills and confidence demonstrating the need and benefit to enrolment of the programme at scale. It did not significantly increase the number of pupils wishing to study medicine. Analysis at scale is required to evaluate the effectiveness of PAS as a key intervention to break down barriers to medicine.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.