Group items tagged

"In this blog, we discussed diagnostic tests and their relationship with likelihood ratios as well as heuristics and cognitive errors."

Our study has shown that the online module on EBM was effective in increasing EBM knowledge and skills of postgraduate students and was well received by both students and tutors. Students and tutors experienced generic challenges that accompany any educational intervention of EBM (e.g. understanding difficult concepts), but in addition had to deal with challenges unique to the online learning environment. Teachers of EBM should acknowledge these so as to enhance and successfully implement EBM teaching and learning for all students.

"It is important for clinicians to recognize that well-timed encouragement to consider and explore the use of hospice services, although it may indeed diminish hope for cure or recovery, simultaneously offers an opportunity to engage with important and time-sensitive developmental tasks."

"Good feedback is a necessary condition for well-calibrated performance by individuals, and is integral to effective team function. More needs to be known about outcomes for feedback to work efficiently. The critical role of feedback in other aspects of ED function, such as education and human factors engineering, should be emphasized. The current interest in medical error and evolving attitudes toward a new culture of patient safety provide a unique opportunity to examine feedback and the critical role it plays in ED function."

"Here, I would like to draw on my experience as a learner as well as an educator, together with the available literature, to draw up a simple 12-step teaching strategy that should help the ward round serve the dual purpose of teaching medical students and junior doctors."

"A simple intervention resulted in improvement in staff confidence, as well as in multiple measures of family satisfaction with communication. This intervention is easily reproduced."

"Thirty are catalogued in this article, together with descriptions of their properties as well as the impact they have on clinical decision making in the ED. Strategies are delineated in each case, to minimize their occurrence. Detection and recognition of these cognitive phenomena are a first step in achieving cognitive de-biasing to improve clinical decision making in the ED."

"The results can be used to reframe understanding of the SP role and of the psychometric discourse of assessment. Ratings awarded by SPs are socially constructed and reveal the complexity of the OSCE process and the unfeasibility of absolute objectivity or standardisation. Standardised patients valued individuality, subjective experience and assessment for learning. The potential of SPs is under-used their greater involvement should be used to promote real partnership as educators move into a post-psychometric era. New-generation assessments should strive to value subjective experience as well as psychometric data in order to utilise the significant potential for learning within assessment."

There is already significant activity in the area of sharing resources in medicine, dentistry and veterinary medicine. This is typically on a sharing amongst limited discipline communities, around a particular area such as assessment and/or on a semi-commercial basis. The OOER project proposes to open up the process to a wider constituency and encourage sharing more openly, as well as reveal existing good practice in medicine, dentistry and veterinary medicine in UK HE.

"As we develop written materials for the general public, we need to think about vocabulary and sentence structure, organization of ideas, as well as layout and design elements so that we can eliminate as many unnecessary barriers as possible."

Computer-based teaching (CBT) is a well-known educational device, but it has never been applied systematically to the teaching of a complex, rare, genetic disease, such as Hunter disease (MPS II). Aim: To develop interactive teaching software functioning as a virtual clinic for the management of MPS II.

The daily ramblings of an overworked ER nurse who likes her job, but hides it very well.

The requirements developed from across 8 different institutions in the original 2005-07 project are given here with tick boxes for departments, schools and institutions to select which aspects of item banking and associated functionality they feel are key to their own current or future processes. The tool will then give match information using the results of appraisal of 12 pieces of software, including some well known software companies e.g. Speedwell and QuestionMark, and some lesser known projects and companies such as TOIA and BTL. The original project was based heavily in medical undergraduate assessment. Note, a 2009 project is due to create and release information relevant to a V2 specification. The V2 will be more generic, building on the information brought forward for V1. UKCDR is a sister project to UMAP, a national collaborative project in the UK for core, applied assessment in undergraduate medicine.

"Conscientiousness breeds continued success, while extroverts fare well in later years"

"We are a non-profit organization advancing research, policy, and clinical models that assure patients are fully informed and involved in decisions that affect their health and well-being."

ePBLMs are actual patient cases in CD format that permits free inquiry. The learner can ask any question of the patient in any sequence and get the patient's response and perform any item of the physical examination in any sequence and learn the result as in the real clinical situation. Any laboratory and diagnostic test can be ordered in any sequence as well. Whatever can be done with the actual patient on history and physical and the ordering of laboratory tests can be done with the ePBLM. A separate "User's Guide" provided with each ePBLM can be used with any of the ePBLMs in the series and provides the key for free inquiry.

The Patient Voices programme was founded by social entrepreneurs Pip Hardy and Tony Sumner in 2003, and aims to facilitate the telling and the hearing of some of the unwritten and unspoken stories of ordinary people so that those who devise and implement strategy in health and social care, as well as the professionals and clinicians directly involved in care, may carry out their duties in a more informed and compassionate manner. We hope that, as a result of seeing the stories, patients, their carers and clinicians may meet as equals and work respectfully together for the benefit of all.

"Using René Magritte's well-known painting The Treachery of Images (This is not a pipe), we argue that the current focus on competencies throughout medical education can sometimes lead educators to rely too heavily on scores, checkmarks, or other forms of assessment that come to be viewed as equivalents for the actual existence of what is being measured. Magritte insisted that the image he created on the canvas was not a pipe but rather a representation of a pipe, an important distinction for educators to remember as we seek ways to evaluate trainees' attainment of the fundamental knowledge and skills of the profession. We also urge that the focus on broader skills, values, flexibility, reflection, and insight development should fall outside the net of a competency orientation in a supportive environment spared from traditional assessment methods, using a classroom in undergraduate medical education as an example of working toward this end. "

"The use of painting in teaching reflective competence was well received. Our students found it an innovative and useful educational tool, an exciting 'out of the box' teaching modality. Moreover, students appreciated the plot, creativity and imagination employed in their fellow students' accounts. Footnotes"

"Explore anatomical structures and functions with AclandAnatomy.com. This Video Atlas presents expertly dissected human specimens as three-dimensional objects-just as they appear in the living body. Intelligent search and navigation tools make it easy to find the content you need to teach, learn, or review. Ideal for students and instructors as well as practitioners, Acland's Video Atlas is a virtual anatomy lab at your fingertips. "