Bedside teaching: An indispensible tool for enhancing the clinical skills of undergraduate medical students

Bedside clinical teaching, an important component of clinical training, was widely practised during the 1960s and early 1970s, but has since declined significantly. It is considered a valuable tool in medical education by both students and faculty members. Its frequently delivered by consultants, but junior doctors seem to be more engaged in this form of clinical teaching, and their value in this respect is becoming more widely recognised. With the current demands placed on the time of consultants, junior doctors are being considered a valuable resource for conducting bedside teaching. It has generally been observed that students want more bedside teaching sessions and some consultants are willing to facilitate more sessions and are of the opinion that these sessions have more educational value in terms of learning different clinical skills, but due to time constraints and other administrative workload, bedside teaching has been declining and disappearing from the medical curricula. So, there is a need to bring significant changes at institutional as well as hospital levels. The current review article was planned to highlight the significance of bedside teaching sessions as a unique educational tool, strategies to improve bedside teaching and different bedside teaching models to be applied in a clinical setting. Databases searched included Cardiff University Library Catalogue, PubMed, Google Scholar, Web of Knowledge and Science Direct.