Background: Yogo teachers need to assess urgency and severity in first aid of students. The assessment can however be a challenge.
Objective: This study aimed to examine and classify the thought process in Yogo teachers for the clinical reasoning with first aid in difficult cases of students
Methods: Yogo teachers’ responses in 157 cases of children who visited the health office due to medical conditions and/or injuries, including extremity injury, head injury, stomachache, headache, breathing difficulty, and syncope, were examined. The Yogo teachers’ thought processes for the clinical reasoning were classified, employing the respective processes of hypothetico-deductive model of clinical reasoning. Relationships of the classified thought processes with characteristics of Yogo teachers and cases were also studied.
Results: The thought process was found to be classified into the following six types: Ia: the “hypothesis validation type”, Ib: the “accepting all what children tell, with hypothesis formation” type, II: the intuition type, III: the hidden hypothesis validation type, IVa: the “gathering comprehensive information” (or checklist) type, and IVb: the “accepting all what children tell, without hypothesis formation” type.’ Five of the six types were without adequate hypothesis formation/validation or information gathering.
Relationships between the six types and the medical conditions/injuries were as follows. For the extremity injury, proportion of the type Ib was small. For the head injury, proportion of III was large and that of Ia was small percentage. For the stomachache, proportion of III was small and that of IV was large. For the headache, proportion of III was small and that of Ib was large.
Conclusion: We first classified Yogo teachers’ thought process in first aid for students. This classification might help improve the Yogo teachers’ assessment and develop educations for their clinical reasoning.
