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Abstract
Background: The knowledge and skills of evidence-based medicine (EBM) in undergraduate medical students are usually taught through stand-alone courses and workshops away from clinical practice. Objectives: To investigate if the integration of a specially designed structured case conference into daily clinical care improves knowledge, attitudes and behaviour related to EBM to a greater extent than the stand-alone didactic lectures. Methods: Final year medical students rotating to the general medicine ward for two weeks’ internship were randomly assigned to receive two hours of didactic lectures about the essentials of EBM (n=47) or to participate in two hours of a structured EBM conference that involved the practice of EBM on the students’ primary care patients (n=47). Aside from this, students in both groups were treated equally including the learning references, teaching faculty, online education material, and tasks assigned for question formulation, searching and critical appraisal. The teaching effects of the integrated EBM structured case conference were evaluated by the validated instruments for the assessment of knowledge, attitudes and behaviour related to EBM. Results: The scores of the knowledge, behaviours, attitudes and anticipated future uses of EBM of the students all significantly improved after the two-week integrated EBM clinical course. When compared to students receiving only didactic EBM lectures, students in the integrated EBM group had significantly higher scores of knowledge (9.5 ± 2.3 vs. 10.6 ± 1.8, p < 0.01) and practical use (15.4 ± 3.9 vs. 18.8 ± 4.3, p < 0.001). In contrast, the scores of attitudes and anticipated future use of EBM were similar between the two groups. Conclusion: EBM teaching for final year medical students involving structured case conference integrated into clinical practice significantly improved the EBM-related knowledge and skills when compared to the didactic lectures. Further refinement of the integrated clinical EBM-teaching curriculum is required to change the attitudes and future use of EBM in these medical students.