JAMA : the journal of the American Medical Association
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To describe the status of palliative care education in the undergraduate medical curriculum and to offer recommendations for improvement. ⋯ The increasing attention to palliative care education has created major opportunities for improving education about care at the end of life. Educational programs should be rigorously evaluated to identify best educational practices.
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Vaccines are underused in the United States, resulting in needless morbidity. Many experts have concluded that clinician education is critical to increasing the nation's vaccination rates. ⋯ Use of TIME modules increases knowledge about immunizations, an essential step to improving vaccination practices of future clinicians. Given the realities of decreased faculty time and budgets, educators face major challenges in developing case-based curricula that prepare learners for the 21st century. Nationally tested libraries of cases such as the TIME modules address this dilemma.
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Following 2 years of heated controversy about the resident match, the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP) recently voted to replace the existing matching algorithm with a newly designed applicant-proposing algorithm. ⋯ The existing NRMP algorithm and the newly designed applicant-proposing algorithm perform similarly. Both algorithms make it sensible for applicants and residency programs to arrange their ROLs based solely on their preferences for possible matches. The choice of algorithms will systematically affect the matches of only a small group of applicants (<0.1%). The NRMP's recent decision to use the applicant-proposing algorithm starting in 1998 reflects a judgment about the impact of this difference on applicants and programs.