Medical education
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OBJECTIVES In keeping with the current emphasis on quality improvement and patient safety, a Canadian division of general internal medicine began holding weekly morbidity and mortality rounds (M&MRs) with postgraduate trainees. Grounded in the medical education and social sciences literatures about such rounds, we sought to explore the teaching and learning processes that occur in M&MRs in order to understand their role in, and contribution to, the current medical education context. METHODS We conducted an ethnography of these M&MRs. ⋯ CONCLUSIONS These M&MRs were effective forums for addressing patient safety and quality improvement competencies. They carried none of the negative functions attributed to such rounds in the sociology literature, focusing neither on absolving responsibility nor on learning socially acceptable ways to discuss death in public. However, this study revealed a marked disjunction between the teaching valued by staff doctors and the learning valued by their trainees.
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OBJECTIVES Training and practice in medicine are inherently stressful. Research into the effects of acute stressors has revealed significant variability in individual responses to stressors, with performance impairments occurring in those who demonstrate elevated subjective and physiological responses. Cognitive appraisals (subjective assessment of situational demands and available resources) of a stressor have been proposed as a predictor variable in stress responses. ⋯ By contrast, for the participants who appraised the scenarios as 'challenges' (in which resources were sufficient to meet the demands), the perceived ratio of demands to resources was not correlated with either the STAI scores or cortisol levels. CONCLUSIONS Subjective appraisals of a situation appear to play an important role in stress responses, which have previously been shown to impair performance. As such, training for high-acuity events should include interventions targeting stress management skills.
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CONTEXT Since the early 1990s, medical school tuition fees have increased substantially in all regions of Canada except Quebec. This provides a natural opportunity to examine the effect of tuition fee increases on medical student demographics, indebtedness and financial stress. METHODS We conducted a national survey of medical students in 2007. ⋯ CONCLUSIONS Quebec medical students differ from their counterparts in the rest of Canada in several notable ways. In particular, medical student debt has increased more and is greater in the rest of Canada than in Quebec. Our findings have implications for doctor human resources planning in Canada.