Medical Student Ultrasound Education, a WFUMB Position Paper, Part II. A consensus statement of ultrasound societies
Beatrice Hoffmann, Michael Blaivas, Jacques S. Abramowicz, Michael Bachmann, Radu Badea, Barbara Braden, Vito Cantisani, Maria Cristina Chammas, Xin‐Wu Cui, Yi Dong, Odd Helge Gilja, Roman Hari, Hein Lamprecht, Harvey Nisenbaum, Christian Nolsøe, Dieter Nürnberg, Helmut Prosch, Maija Radziņa, Florian Recker, Alexander Sachs, Adrian Săftoiu, Andreas L. Serra, Sudhir Vinayak, Sue Westerway, Yi‐Hong Chou, Christoph F. Dietrich
Abstract
Ultrasound is becoming a fundamental first-line diagnostic tool for most medical specialties and an innovative tool to teach anatomy, physiology and pathophysiology to undergraduate and graduate students. However, availability of structured training programs during medical school is lagging behind and many physicians still acquire all their ultrasound skills during postgraduate training.There is wide variation in medical student ultrasound education worldwide. Sharing successful educational strategies from early adopter medical schools and learning from leading education programs should advance the integration of ultrasound into the university medical school curricula. In this overview, we present current approaches and suggestions by ultrasound societies concerning medical student educa-tion throughout the world. Based on these examples, we formulate a consensus statement with suggestions on how to integrate ultrasound teaching into the preclinical and clinical medical curricula.