Date Submitted
6-2022
Faculty Advisor
Amy Sickel, PsyD
Second Faculty Advisor
Leah Barreca, PsyD
Third Faculty Advisor
Esperanza Anaya, PhD
Abstract
The current study was a didactic training that contributed to students’ knowledge on working with anxious children. Medical school training typically consists of four years that is dedicated to teaching future providers the basic science and providing clinical exposures to populations of interest (Gordon et al., 2010; Wilkerson et al., 2009). All this training is imperative to help shape students into well-informed medical providers along with medical trainings on different populations, which is also equally important. Research had indicated that behavioral and mental health problems in the child population is prevalent and medical providers are feeling less equipped and trained to serve this population and their families (Horwitz et al., 2015; McMillan et al., 2020; Raval & Doupnik, 2017). Medical providers tend to have one of the first encounters with children and families with mental health needs because of the high comorbidity rates between mental health problems and physical health conditions (Doupnik et al., 2020; Hodgkinson et al., 2017; Torio et al., 2015). To address the lack of medical training, the current study had designed a training video to teach students how to quickly build rapport with their patients and conduct medical play with common tools found in a provider’s office as an early intervention to assess and reduce anxiety in children. Building on their prior knowledge of anxiety in children can help medical students reduce anxiety in children, shorten medical visit time and improve the accuracy of diagnoses in children. The participants for the training video were from a Midwestern medical university who had access to the video via Canvas and were prompted to fill out survey questions at the end of the video. Feedback was a crucial part of the current study and would be used for reevaluating and modifying the training video for future utilization.
