ArticleFamily medicine2025
Clinical Questions Addressed by First-Year Medical Students in Primary Care: A Cross-Sectional Study.
Article in Family medicine, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
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.
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Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- The Diagnostic Blind Spot in Early Medical Education.Family medicine · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
BACKGROUND AND
objectivesIn the context of an evidence-based medicine theme, medical students in their first year at McGill University formulate a PICO (population, intervention, comparator, and outcome) question arising from a patient encounter in family medicine. We sought to analyze clinical questions addressed within PICO projects submitted by first-year medical students shadowing a family physician.
methodsA total of 180 student projects were split equally between two reviewers. Questions were then classified according to a three-component classification system: (a) type of question (screening, diagnosis, prognosis, treatment [including preventive treatment], etiology, and harm); (b) Ely's taxonomy; and (c) question topics based on the 105 priority topics of the College of Family Physicians of Canada.
resultsThe most frequent question type among the students was treatment/prevention (152, 84.0%), followed by etiology (7, 3.9%), screening (6, 3.3%), prognosis (6, 3.3%), harm (5, 2.8%), and diagnosis (4, 2.2%). Based on Ely's taxonomy, the most frequent question was "How should I treat condition x (not limited to drug treatment)?" (105, 58.3%). Of the 105 priority topics from the College of Family Physicians of Canada, in children (18, 10%), pain (16, 8.9%), pregnancy (12, 6.7%), depression (11, 6.1%), and behavioral problems (10, 5.6%) were most frequently represented.
conclusionsClinical questions addressed by first-year medical students, of which the vast majority are about treatment and prevention, can be classified. Students did not commonly address questions related to diagnosis, indicating that additional teaching may be required to use the PICO format to address this question type.
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