Trial reportBMC medical education2024
Virtual patients versus standardized patients for improving clinical reasoning skills in ophthalmology residents. A randomized controlled trial.
Trial report 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 10 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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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
10 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 12 citations in OpenAlex.
- Virtual patients in medical education: a bibliometric analysis based on the wos core collection and scopus databases.Frontiers in medicine · 2026Pooled it
- Effectiveness of Virtual Simulations Versus Mannequins and Real Persons in Medical and Nursing Education: Meta-Analysis and Trial Sequential Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials.Journal of medical Internet research · 2024Pooled it
- Virtual Standardized Patients for Improving Clinical Thinking Ability Training in Residents: Randomized Controlled Trial.JMIR medical education · 2025Trial
- Enhancing medical education for undergraduates: integrating virtual reality and case-based learning for shoulder joint.BMC medical education · 2024Trial
- Cost-effectiveness of virtual patient integration in dermatology education: evidence for precision education by learner expertise.BMC medical education · 2026Article
- Virtual vs. standardized patients - a preliminary comparison of advantages and disadvantages of a VR and a conventional learning unit for medical students in child and adolescent psychiatry.BMC medical education · 2026Article
- Virtual patient simulation to enhance medical students' clinical communication and decision-making skills: a pilot study.BMC medical education · 2025Article
- Integrating Standardized Patient into Case-Based Learning in Posterior Fossa Meningioma Teaching: Evaluating the Added Value Beyond Case-Based Learning Alone.Advances in medical education and practice · 2025Article
- A Scoping Review of Pakistani Healthcare Simulation: Insights for Lower-Middle-Income Countries.Cureus · 2024Review
- The evolution of simulation-based medical education research: From traditional to virtual simulations.Heliyon · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 4 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundHistory taking and clinical reasoning are important skills that require knowledge, cognition and meta-cognition. It is important that a trainee must experience multiple encounters with different patients to practice these skills. However, patient safety is also important, and trainees are not allowed to handle critically ill patients. To address this issue, a randomized controlled trial was conducted to determine the effectiveness of using Virtual Patients (VP) versus Standardized Patients (SP) in acquiring clinical reasoning skills in ophthalmology postgraduate residents.
methodsPostgraduate residents from two hospitals in Lahore, Pakistan, were randomized to either the VP group or the SP group and were exposed to clinical reasoning exercise via the VP or SP for 30 min after the pretest. This was followed by a posttest. One month after this activity, a follow-up posttest was conducted. The data were collected and analysed using IBM-SPSS version 25. Repeated measures ANOVA was used to track the effect of learning skills over time.
resultsThe mean age of the residents was 28.5 ± 3 years. The male to female ratio was 1:1.1. For the SP group, the mean scores were 12.6 ± 3.08, 16.39 ± 3.01 and 15.39 ± 2.95, and for the VP group, the mean scores were 12.7 ± 3.84, 16.30 ± 3.19 and 15.65 ± 3.18 for the pretest, posttest and follow-up posttest, respectively (p value < 0.00). However, the difference between the VP and SP groups was not statistically significant (p = 0.896). Moreover, there was no statistically significant difference between the VP and SP groups regarding the retention of clinical reasoning ability. In terms of learning gain, compared with the VP group, the SP group had a score of 51.46% immediately after clinical reasoning exercise as compared to VP group, in which it was 49.1%. After one month, it was 38.01 in SP and 40.12% in VP group.
conclusionVPs can be used for learning clinical reasoning skills in postgraduate ophthalmology residents in a safe environment. These devices can be used repeatedly without any risk to the real patient. Although similarly useful, SP is limited by its nonavailability for repeated exercises.
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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.