Evaluation of medical students' hospital training: interest of students' essays.

To evaluate the impact of teaching during hospital training in an adult cancer ward, 107 consecutive students were asked to freely select the chart of a patient representative of their course and to write comments on it, at the end of their course. Students selected charts of young patients rather than older ones (P less than 0.0001). Most of the patients had a poor prognosis (69%). Students frequently emphasized psychosocial aspects of cancer and patient's information (patient-student relationship: 50%; diagnosis acceptance: 36%; information: 19%), but rarely considered post-treatment sequelae of cured patients (4%), palliative care (9%), and truth (10%). The selection of a large majority of poor prognosis patients led us to invite them to attend consultations to meet patients who are cured or in fair condition. Other topics must be emphasized (palliative care, truth, and post-treatment morbidity). Finally, such an evaluation provides good information on the course of the students and is easily performed and analysed.