Role of clinical skills centers in maintaining and promoting clinical teaching

Up to near time, clinical teaching was wholly performed at bedside in which patients were used as teaching aids. The profound changes in medical education (staff's heavy administrative or research duties, and reduced funding for establishing university hospitals) and health care systems (reduced hospital stay and admission on the day of procedures due to rapid advance in technologies of diagnosis and treatment) had made this teaching method less effective, resulting in a profound decline in standards of acquisition of clinical skills among medical students. A new teaching tool, clinical skill centre, was suggested to solve the problem of inadequacies in bedside teaching. The clinical skills centre is a multidisciplinary educational facility that provides clinical skills training to all health care professionals. The clinical skills centre provides students with the opportunity to initially practice clinical techniques on simulators, in a safe environment, without affecting the quality of patients' care in anyway. Nevertheless, it should be regarded as an extra tool for bedside teaching, and not to replace it.