Journal Club: An Educational Experience for Thoracic Surgery Fellows

Introduction & Due to Iranian Thoracic surgery fellows’ exaggerated belief in textbooks on the one hand and their unfamiliarity with scientific search and reading articles and article appraisal on the other hand, only a few fellows employ articles to promote their scientific work and practice. Furthermore as a result of fellows’ incapability to prepare informative power point presentations and give speech properly, fellows are unable to present new information to their colleagues. Participation in journal clubs and presenting articles could help fellows to become skillful in mentioned issues. This study aimed to evaluate the effect of journal clubs on different aspects of reading, presenting and practices of thoracic surgery fellows. After 4 years of conducting journal clubs every month, evaluation survey via e mail from thoracic surgery fellows (who had participated in 22 journal clubs in their 2 years training) was carried out to assess the effect of journal clubs on scientific search, study appraisal, power point preparation, study habit, presentation skill, and practice promotion. More than 80% of the fellows stated that journal clubs had been very good or excellent for achieving the mentioned educational goals. Additionally considerable percentage of fellows evaluated the effectiveness of this educational method on separated asked items to be very good or excellent. Conducting journal club sessions not only improves fellows approach in reading articles, better understanding of the text books, and preparing power point presentations, but also provides an opportunity for them to update their information in one of the selected thoracic surgery subjects every month. Bedsides, a valuable archive from selected and updated articles have been gathered for Iranian thoracic surgeons every month. As the running of journal clubs is simple and clear, it is quite possible for other departments in our medical schools to employ our method and carry out similar journal clubs.