Heart and Guts for Medicine: Pre-university students' perceptions and attitudes about the anatomy and physiology outreach

Background: Outreach activities serve as vital components in the realm of education, particularly in the context of healthcare profession. The purpose of these outreaches is to motivate and inspire prospective students to embark their journey into health professions education and foster their pursuit of careers in healthcare. The empirical support for this hypothesis is relatively scarce within the existing research. Objective: The primary objective of this study is to gather evidence on the attitudes and perceptions of pre-university students on outreach activities in health professional education via an integrated anatomy and physiology outreach. The aim is to gain the insights of the student learning experiences including their interaction with the learning tools, engagement in activities, and interaction with facilitators and how these experiences influence student motivation to pursue a career in health care. Methods: A tailored workshop mimicking medical teaching was taught over two days at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine in Singapore utilizing the multimodal practical and team-based learning pedagogy. Ninety pre-university students from 21 pre-university institutions in Singapore participated; their experiences were evaluated using a four-point Likert scale and open-ended survey questions. Free text comments were analysed using inductive thematic analysis. Results: Most students felt that the course materials were adequate (Mean ± SD = 3.56 ± 0.56) and met the learning objectives (3.72 ± 0.52) and instructors were clear (3.72 ± 0.52) and effective (3.70 ± 0.53). They liked the organization of the outreach session (3.64 ± 0.48) and held high motivation to study medicine or allied/biomedical sciences (3.69 ± 0.53). Practical and team-based learning were regarded as exceedingly satisfactory (3.63 ± 0.53 and 3.58 ± 0.53, respectively); all the respondents would recommend this course to peers. Thematic analysis revealed gaining a new perspective, unique learning settings, motivation and aspirations, sense of satisfaction and interaction with facilitators. Conclusions: The structured outreaches provide students with unique opportunities to experience medical school preclinical learning environment, which has positive impact on building their knowledge, understanding of human structure and function, and increase students’ motivation to pursue future health profession careers.