Plant a seed series: the impact of an online outreach package on school pupils’ knowledge, skills, and attitudes to medicine

Medicine is one of the most inaccessible professions in the United Kingdom (UK). The Plant a Seed (PAS) series was created to address this; it is an online pre-recorded three-part video series to “Inspire”, “Educate” and “Motivate” pupils from widening participation backgrounds on Medicine. We explored the impact of PAS on pupils’ knowledge, skills and attitude to Medicine.

We conducted a national pretest-posttest study of Years 7–9 pupils in the UK. 503 schools were invited to PAS, following ethics approval. Consented pupils viewed all three episodes asynchronously and completed a pre-and post-series Likert scale confidence questionnaire, which evaluated their knowledge, skills and attitudes to a medical career. A Shapiro-Wilk test showed the lack of a normal distribution (p < 0.05); therefore, a Wilcoxon signed-rank test statistically compared pretest-posttest results of each pupil.

70 pupils in Years 7–9 from 2 schools participated in this study. PAS was shown to significantly increase pupils’ knowledge of the role and life of a doctor, medicine as a degree, admissions requirements, and careers in medicine (p < 0.05). There was a significant increase in pupils believing they could study medicine. The intervention did not significantly increase the desire for pupils to study medicine (p = 0.187).

PAS significantly improved pupils’ knowledge, skills and confidence demonstrating the need and benefit to enrolment of the programme at scale. It did not significantly increase the number of pupils wishing to study medicine. Analysis at scale is required to evaluate the effectiveness of PAS as a key intervention to break down barriers to medicine.