Medical Education

" Simulation because of its unique effects on learning is currently being successfully used by many institutions as a means to produce that integration through its use in the teaching of the basic sciences. Preliminary data indicate that simulation is an effective tool for basic science education and garners high learner satisfaction."

"The principal aim of this course is to enable health educators to effectively implement and facilitate a variety of simulation-based learning opportunities for their students."

A series of articles

"A structured residency-based curriculum facilitates resident demonstration of SBP and practice-based learning and improvement. Residents gain knowledge and skills though this enterprise and hospitals gain access to trainees who help to solve ongoing problems and meet accreditation requirements."

"The clinical teaching and learning environment is an ideal field for using adult learning theories and demonstrating their utility. Reinforcing clear thinking in both teacher and learner and considering them should improve clinical learning, and even clinical outcomes."

"For each theory, they suggest practical action steps for the learner, the teacher, and the learning environment in an effort to provide a road map for developing master learners."

"Our experience with the calculators shows that it helps surgeons improve the quality of care they provide their patients because it improves shared decision making and patient-centered informed consent."

"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 purpose of this article is to argue for the further investigation and revision of these initial attempts to apply checklists to the diagnostic process. The basic idea behind checklists is to provide an alternative to reliance on intuition and memory in clinical problem solving. This kind of solution is demanded by the complexity of diagnostic reasoning, which often involves sense-making under conditions of great uncertainty and limited time."

"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."

"Interns touched their patients (which could be either a physical exam or just a handshake or a gentle, caring touch) during 65 percent of visits and asked open-ended questions 75 percent of the time. But they introduced themselves only 40 percent of the time, explained their role only 37 percent of the time and sat down during only 9 percent of visits."

"Both HFS and LFS learning resulted in consistent improvements in performance in comparisons with no-intervention control groups. However, nearly all the studies showed no significant advantage of HFS over LFS, with average differences ranging from 1% to 2%."

"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."

"There are three types of empathy (Goleman, 2007): Cognitive: knowing how another person feels and what they might be thinking Emotional: physically feeling what another person is feeling Compassionate: not only understanding a person's situation and feeling with them, but being moved to help them"

"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."

"MedEdPORTAL Publications and Georgia Regents University have partnered to bring you the Directory and Repository of Educational Assessment Measures (DREAM). DREAM's mission is to achieve excellence in health sciences education by providing easy-to-locate, publically accessible information about assessment instruments to health science educators, educational researchers, and program/curriculum evaluators."

" The authors of this commentary reflect on a learning-theory-based model for developing master learners presented by Schumacher and colleagues in this issue of Academic Medicine. They suggest that bioscientific and sociocultural theories can enhance different aspects of that model and provide specific examples from neuropsychophysiology,"

"Music can function as a metaphor for medical practice. We can think of the consultation as performance art,4 which may just make me more nervous at work. What better description of general practice than a virtuoso struggle to perform near impossible feats against the backdrop of physical limitations to produce something beautiful and moving?"

An Australian video about some of the issues of bringing a resident into a rural practice