A Survey of Clinical Trainees’ Awareness Regarding Clinical Training at Kyushu University School of Dentistry : Introduction of a New System of Clinical Training

<p> Abstract Kyushu University School of Dentistry reviewed its conventional clinical training and started a new system in 2017 to improve the clinical training with the participation and to establish a method for evaluating clinical skills, and has been continuously making modifications since then. The purpose of the present study was to understand the trainees’ awareness and thoughts regarding the clinical training, and to evaluate the enhancement of clinical training and the satisfaction of trainees by a retrospective analysis of the results of a questionnaire survey conducted on clinical trainees enrolled over a seven-year period from 2016 to 2022. The questionnaire consisted of eight items including “clinical practice in general” and “evaluation methods” on a 5-point Likert scale, and five items including “self-experienced cases” and “COVID-19” that could be freely filled in. Comparisons between years were made using the chi-square test for items on a 5-point scale. In addition, text mining techniques were applied for the items of free writing. Of the 340 trainees who had completed the clinical training in the seven-year period, 303 responded (response rate 89.1％). The results showed that the number of respondents who answered “satisfactory” tended to increase with each passing year for items on the 5-point scale, although the major alteration in 2017 caused confusion for the trainees. Furthermore, the top three words that appeared most frequently in free writing over the seven-year period were “training,” “supervisor,” and “student,” with frequent co-occurrences of “supervisor” and “student,” suggesting that the relationship with the supervising instructor is important for clinical trainees when carrying out their clinical training. Based on the results of this study, although there are several issues that need to be considered regarding the clinical training in our university, it seems to be improving steadily with continuous modifications.</p>