An evaluation into the impact of expert patient medical education sessions on both the patients and their partners.

Introduction

As the population and life expectancy increases, the demand on healthcare has been increasing. Hospital inpatients are older, more unwell, more multimorbid and frailer, resulting in challenging patient-student interactions1. Involving patients as instructors in a simulated or controlled environment allows students to gain hands-on experience and a unique perspective on lived experiences2. University of Manchester MBChB students do a 4-week placement in ageing and complex health. As part of this they have a facilitated session with an expert patient living with Parkinsonism accompanied by their partner. The aim of this is to enable the students to examine the impact of the disease on the patient themselves but also their immediate family.

This study aimed to analyse the effect of these sessions on the expert patient and their partner.

Methods

Each session involves two expert patients each with a diagnosis of Parkinsonism and a maximum of 16 medical students. The teaching is split into two discussion groups facilitated by clinical supervisors. At the end of the session, the patients completed an evaluation questionnaire to understand what went well, what could be improved and whether they would be happy to re-attend in the future. Data was collected between August 2024 to October 2025.

Results

15 feedback forms were analysed. Results showed that all expert patients would be willing to partake in further sessions with medical students in the future. 4 patients enjoyed the session as they were able to “tell their story”. 3 patients specifically enjoyed the interaction with the medical students and explaining the “personal side of Parkinson’s Disease”.

4 patients felt students could ask more questions during the session and suggested integrating the use of question sheets to prompt further discussion. 2 patients indicated that student questions were “freer” when the facilitator stepped out the room and felt this would improve the session going forward.

Conclusion

Structured education sessions such as this, can be a useful tool for students to evaluate the impact of illness not only on the patient, but on their partners too. Improving patient experience appears to be dependent on student participation and this can be facilitated with the use of simple question sheet prompts. We plan to further evaluate the teaching with the use of the question prompt sheets co-designed with the expert patients in the second semester.