Medical educators have a familiar problem: students rarely fill out the forms meant to tell them whether a clinical placement worked. One team tried something different and attached memes to its reminders. Completion of end-of-placement feedback forms rose from 32.3% to 85.5%, according to a quality-improvement project published in 2025 in The Clinical Teacher.
The project, by David Ritter, J. Lange and S. Parmar, compared two cycles of students. The first group of 62 received standard email or WhatsApp reminders. The second group of 55 received reminders that included memes tailored to each placement. The difference was statistically significant (p < 0.001). In rough numbers, about 20 of 62 students returned the form before the change, compared with about 47 of 55 after it.
