Group items tagged

"Despite being recognized as a fundamental part of the educational process and emphasized for several decades in medical education, the influence of the feedback process is still suboptimal. This may not be surprising, because the focus is primarily centered on only one half of the process - the teachers. The learners are the targets of the feedback process and improvement needs to be shifted. Learners need to be empowered with the skills needed to receive and utilize feedback and compensate for less than ideal feedback delivery due to the busy clinical environment."

Facilitating the provision of detailed, deep and useful feedback is an important design feature of any educational programme. Here we evaluate feedback provided to medical students completing short transferable skills projects. Feedback quantity and depth were evaluated before and after a simple intervention to change the structure of the feedback-provision form from a blank free-text feedback form to a structured proforma that asked a pair of short questions for each of the six domains being assessed. Each pair of questions consisted of asking the marker 'what was done well?' and 'what changes would improve the assignment?' Changing the form was associated with a significant increase in the quantity of the feedback and in the amount and quality of feedback provided to students. We also observed that, for these double-marked projects, the marker designated as 'marker 1' consistently wrote more feedback than the marker designated 'marker 2'.

"Direct observation of a medical trainees' performance in clinical settings remains challenging. Direct observation serves to ascertain and document the acquisition of core clinical skills. Barriers to direct observation include the lack of effective implementation strategies and difficulties in delivering transparent standards for judging competence at the bedside. Studies have demonstrated that in the absence of transparent standards, the discriminating ability of evaluators judging the exact same clinical performance is poor. The development of criterion-based assessment tools for use by observers during student-patient encounters offers a potential solution to this problem. "

In a first for the UK, the University of Glasgow is to offer Intellectual Property - including ground-breaking medical and scientific research - to business and entrepreneurs free of charge.

New research from the Kaohslung Medical University Hospital in Taiwan shows a correlation in young teens between internet addiction and other psychological disorders. According to CNN and the research report, "ADHD and hostility were linked to Internet ad

The blog of a Clinical Lecturer in Cardifff University