Facilitators and barriers for bedside teaching in the teaching hospitals of coastal south India

Objectives: The aim was to assess and compare the perception of clinical faculty toward bedside teaching (BST) for undergraduate medical students and the barriers encountered by them. Methods: The present cross-sectional study was carried out among clinical faculty of three tertiary care hospitals attached to a medical college in Mangalore. A total of 94 clinical faculties, excluding the post-graduates, were approached by using convenient sampling. A semi structured questionnaire was distributed to the participants of this study. The response to the perceptions and barriers of BST was captured using five-point Likert scale. Results: The age of the study participants ranged from 27 to 60 years (mean age of 38±8.85 years). Most of the study participants strongly agreed that BST is an essential part of clinical medicine, which improves communication skills, practical skills by providing trigger scenarios to stimulate learning. They disagreed toward classroom teaching being equal to BST in imparting knowledge and students being capable of acquiring knowledge from clinical books without BST. There was a significant difference in perception score of barriers toward BST among medical and surgical faculty in relation to bigger group size and increase the workload being deterring factors for effective BST. Conclusion: BST is still valued by the clinical fraternity as an efficient teaching tool for the medical students even in this era of simulation based training.