Group items tagged

"It's that time of year again. The references are in, the applications are complete, interviews have been accepted, flights are booked and medical students across Canada are preparing themselves for the rigamarole known as CaRMS that will determine where they will be living for the next 2-5 years and what kind of medicine they will be practicing for the rest of their lives."

"Developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky defined what the person or a student can do - or the problems they can solve - as three different stages: What a student can do on their own, working independently or without anyone's help. What the student can do with the help of someone. What it is beyond the student's reach even if helped by someone else."

"Don't overlook the value of higher-level multiple-choice questions for teaching. In areas where the target audience has some degree of prior knowledge, or where their life experience is relevant, I often make online courses denser by using multiple-choice exercises instead of the more traditional present-and-test format. This technique is also useful when there is room for judgment, or the preferred choice is conditional and you want the student to understand how different circumstances can affect the preferred action."

"The days are gone when a doctor walked into a patient's room and grabbed the paper chart at the end of his bed to check his medical history. iPads and tablet computing have revolutionized the way many companies do business, and the medical field is no different. The sharp, intuitive displays and interactive content of tablets naturally make doctor's visits a more collaborative process. "

" We stress the importance of ambient and contextual influences on the quality of individual decision making and the need to address factors known to impair calibration of the decision maker. We also emphasise the importance of introducing these concepts and corollary development of training in critical thinking in the undergraduate level in medical education. "

"Now it seems that there are at least three ways in which a member of an audience can participate in a medical lecture while not closely listening to to it. They are the following: (1) browsing and digesting the lecture PowerPoint file that I will assume has been made available on-line prior to the lecture; (2) submitting tweet comments or questions about the lecture that could be collected by a lecture monitor, as suggested above by Mike, and presented to the lecturer during discussion periods; and (3) browsing the web"

"A number of reasons commonly given for lecturing and claims commonly made for the efficiency of lecturers are examined for their basis in empirical evidence and common sense. Most of these claims are found to be somewhat weak. It appears that lecturing takes place rather more often than can be reasonably justified. The real reasons for the popularity of lecturing amongst lecturers are then examined. Of the twenty reasons for lecturing examined here, the first nine have little substance and the last eleven are avoidable."

"Drawing on case studies from news media to visualization research, we identify distinct genres of narrative visualization. We characterize these design differences, together with interactivity and messaging, in terms of the balance between the narrative flow intended by the author (imposed by graphical elements and the interface) and story discovery on the part of the reader (often through interactive exploration). Our framework suggests design strategies for narrative visualization, including promising under-explored approaches to journalistic storytelling and educational media."

"By offloading tasks from the 15-minute visit in order to prioritize the patient's agenda, adding group, telephone, and electronic encounters, and reorganizing services with the aim of maximizing the health of a practice's entire patient population, innovative primary care practices could lead primary care out of crisis into an era of renewal."

This article seems to advocate the trend in UK based primary care- but key questions remain unanswered, can trust be transferred from the individual doctor to the team? Does this dilute the 'doctor as drug' benefit?

"They review some classics including: "The rational clinical examination. Is this patient having a myocardial infarction?" in JAMA 1998. "The International Registry of Acute Aortic Dissection (IRAD): new insights into an old disease" in JAMA 2000. "Evaluation of D-dimer in the diagnosis of suspected deep-vein thrombosis" in NEJM 2003. "The Canadian C-spine rule versus the NEXUS low-risk criteria in patients with trauma" in NEJM 2003. "Computed tomography of the head before lumbar puncture in adults with suspected meningitis" in NEJM 2001."

"The CFD has created the Accessible Resource for Teaching online learning tool to provide additional ways for individuals and groups to participate in faculty development. The goal of ART is to bring faculty development to the teaching practice through the use of short, focused modules. Each module focuses on a particular teaching and learning topic that can be applied in the teaching context and practice."

Homeless persons may be underserved by the end-of-life care system as a result of barriers that they face to accessing end-of-life care services. Changes in the rules and regulations that reflect the health needs and circumstances of homeless persons and measures to improve continuity of care have the potential to increase equity in the end-of-life care system for this underserved population.

A Doctor-Professor answers the old question "What is the single best thing we can do for our health" in a completely new way. Dr. Mike Evans is founder of the Health Design Lab at the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute, an Associate Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of Toronto, and a staff physician at St. Michael's

The "hidden curriculum" refers to medical education as more than simple transmission of knowledge and skills; it is also a socialization process. Wittingly or unwittingly, norms and values transmitted to future physicians often undermine the formal messages of the declared curriculum. The hidden curriculum consists of what is implicitly taught by example day to day, not the explicit teaching of lectures, grand rounds, and seminars. I am increasingly aware of how those of us engaged in family medicine education are blind to it.

This pattern suggests that students who are tested throughout the semester with high-level questions acquire deep conceptual understanding of the material and better memory for the course information

The authors provide a conceptual analysis of the issues and language related to a broader focus on understanding the relationship between the development of competency and the formation of identities during medical training.

The NNT offers a measurement of the impact of a medicine or therapy by estimating the number of patients that need to be treated in order to have an impact on one person. The concept is statistical, but intuitive, for we know that not everyone is helped by a medicine or intervention - some benefit, some are harmed, and some are unaffected. The NNT tells us how many of each.

The Journal of the International Association of Medical Science Educators (JIAMSE) is the redesigned, peer-reviewed publication of the International Association of Medical Science Educators. The purpose of this electronic publication is to present scholarly activities, opinions, and resources in medical science education.

Glenn Regehr and Maria Mylopoulos Many of the assumptions about the "adult, self-directed learner" that form the basis of the current model of formal continuing education delivery are largely unsupported by the literature. Yet most practitioners maintain