Abstract

Rationale: Auscultation is the first examination of a patient in GP’s office. It is totally subjective and depends on physician’s abilities to interpret the sounds based on their psychoacoustical features. Objectives: A cross-sectional assessment of the skills of physicians and medical students in classification of respiratory system sounds in children is presented here. Methods: The experiment comprised 24 respiratory system sounds with different phenomena. 185 participants took part in the experiment. Results: We revealed difficulties in both recognition and description of respiratory sounds. The results  significantly improved when sound classes were grouped to form more general ones. Conclusions: We confirm that this is a global problem which cannot be neglected and may result in ambiguities in diagnosis and mistreatment. Moreover the problem of insufficient training both during study and during medical practice is also highlighted here. There is also a perceived global need to standardize the nomenclature of auscultation sounds.