The impact of undergraduate medical conferences on medical student choice of speciality

Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. It may contain errors, so check it against the video before quoting.

So we're here today to present our research, our poster presentation, on our work that we did as conference co-chairs for the KCL Paediatric Society last year. As part of our role we organised a student undergraduate conference where we invited medical students from around the city and also sixth formers to attend the conference. And what we were really interested in is, a lot of societies hold conferences as such to increase student interest in certain specialties. We really wanted to see if these conferences impact these students in any sort of way and influence their interests in pursuing that specific specialty.

So our conference was last year, so February 2023, and it consisted of a morning of lectures where we invited four different speakers from a breadth of paediatric specialties, and then in the afternoon we divided workshops. So we had sixth former specific workshops and then we also had medical student specific workshops that were tailored to each of the age groups. And what we did is before the conference and also after the conference we sent out feedback forms and we asked the students several questions, trying to gauge their interest in, how much they knew about paediatrics and if they were actually interested in pursuing it.

So what we found is that interest in paediatrics didn't change in our results. However, understanding of the paediatric training pathway and what it is actually like to be in a paediatric career did increase, and we think that there are three main reasons for this. So within medical school lots of students have limited paediatric placements and as a result limited exposure to those from the Royal Colleges. So we invited a speaker from RCPCH who was able to talk through the training pathway, and it highlighted how knowing the complexity of the specialty training pathway doesn't deter students from pursuing paediatrics. And we also had a range of subspecialty talks which gave an idea of the breadth of paediatrics to the medical students and sixth formers.

So what we really hope to pass forward on is how medical schools themselves should really be bringing in this guidance on specialty applications to medical students, so that earlier on in our student career we can think about what we need to do and where we need to go next.