Enhancing Consultants' IT Skills: A Reverse Mentoring Project

13-16 July 2002 Many medical students arrive with excellent IT skills and experience of mentoring their peers in secondary school. Senior clinicians, by contrast, did not grow up with the technology and often feel left behind by the IT revolution. This generation gap is often seen as a threat to the authority of clinical tutors. We have set up a reverse mentoring scheme to help consultants develop their IT skills. With a grant from the post graduate dean, we have recruited thirty medical students to act as personal trainers to thirty consultants and specialist registrars. Each participant is issued with a set of learning vouchers which enables them to purchase four hours of training and a password to access the learning resources from the project website. This paper will describe the methods used, and report on the results of this unique reverse mentoring scheme.