Can nurses teach tomorrow's doctors? A nursing perspective on involvement in community-based medical education.

The increasing importance of primary care suggests an important role for the whole primary healthcare team in the education of 'tomorrow's doctors'. Few studies have evaluated the contribution and views of staff other than general practitioners. We used a questionnaire survey to elicit the perspective of 65 community-based nurses involved in a new undergraduate medical course. Some 67% of the cohort had already undertaken training to teach others, and were confident of their teaching skills but were overly reliant on the general practitioners for information, and on the goodwill of colleagues for time to teach. The findings suggest a need for structural changes in the process of multidisciplinary medical education, supporting the need for teaching commitments to be coordinated at practice rather than individual tutor level. The high level of professional development for teaching among community nurses suggests that there is a sound basis for encouraging such valuable professional input into medical education in the future.