Medical teaching at a peripheral site by videoconferencing.

The departments of Child Health and Mental Health of Aberdeen University's Medical Faculty recently took part in a 3 month trial assessing the potential of videoconferencing as a medium for teaching students on peripheral hospital attachments. The equipment used was British Telecom's VC7000 Videoconferencing System and an ISDN2 (integrated services digital network) connection, which was installed between two sites. The locations used were a teaching room in the Royal Aberdeen Children's Hospital and the Paediatric Unit at Raigmore Hospital in Inverness. This paper describes the resources required to support the trial, the methods used to run it and the results of staff and student evaluation of the trial. Evaluation forms were completed and returned by eight members of staff and by 30 fourth- and fifth-year medical students. The results indicated that, although after this particular trial both staff and students rated the overall usefulness as low, they attributed this to technical problems and limitations specific to the type of equipment used rather than to the method itself. The overall impression was that videoconferencing with ISDN has potential as a teaching tool in the medical undergraduate course but that further improvements in image quality and voice switching are required.