Medical education
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Most US medical schools have instituted cultural competence education in the undergraduate curriculum. This training is intended to improve the quality of care that doctors, the majority of whom are White, deliver to ethnic and racial minority patients. Research into the outcomes of cultural competence training programmes reveals that they have been largely ineffective in improving doctors' skills. In varied curricular formats, programmes tend to teach group-specific cultural knowledge, despite the vast heterogeneity of racial and ethnic groups. This cultural essentialism diminishes training effectiveness. ⋯ Integrating an intersectional framework into cultural competency education can better prepare doctors for caring for racial and ethnic minority patients. This paper recommends curriculum elements for the classroom and clinical training that can improve doctor knowledge and skills for caring for diverse groups. Medical schools can use the proposed model to facilitate the development of new educational strategies and learning experiences. These improvements can lead to more equitable care and ultimately diminish disparities in health care. Although these recommendations are designed with US schools in mind, they may improve doctor understanding and care of marginal populations across the world.
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Accreditation of medical education programmes is becoming increasingly prevalent worldwide, but beyond the face validity of these quality assurance methods, data linking accreditation to improved student outcomes are limited. Mexico and the Philippines both have voluntary systems of medical education accreditation and large numbers of students who voluntarily take components of the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE). We investigated the examination performance of Mexican and Philippine citizens who attended medical schools in their home countries by medical school accreditation status. ⋯ These findings support the value and usefulness of accreditation in Mexico and the Philippines by linking accreditation to improved student outcomes.
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The current paper describes a model of learning that has been used to produce efficient learning, thus yielding greater retention of information and superior performance under stress. In this paper, the model is applied to the learning of technical skills. ⋯ The practical application of the CPF to simulation-based medical education and training is described. Firstly, a simple conceptual model that utilises three key elements to adjust the functional difficulty of the tasks to be learned is outlined. Secondly, a number of assessment strategies that may be necessary to ensure that the trainee remains in the optimal learning zone are proposed. Thirdly, a practical example is used to demonstrate how to utilise this conceptual model to design simulation environments suitable for teaching an endotracheal intubation task to beginners and more advanced trainees.
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Developing diagnostic competence in students is a major goal of medical education, but there is little empirical evidence on instructional strategies that foster the acquisition of this competence. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of structured reflection compared with the generation of immediate or differential diagnosis while practising with clinical cases on learning clinical diagnosis. ⋯ Structured reflection while practising with cases appears to foster the learning of clinical knowledge more effectively than the generation of immediate or differential diagnoses and therefore seems to be an effective instructional approach to developing diagnostic competence in students.
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Little is known about the relationship between the career preferences of medical students and the medical schools at which they are enrolled. Our aim was to explore this relationship early in students' medical training. ⋯ Students' early career preferences were similar across the five medical schools. These preferences result from the interplay among demographic factors and the perceived characteristics of the various specialties. Maintaining a satisfactory work-life balance is very important to tomorrow's doctors, and the data hint that this may be breaking down some of the traditional gender differences in specialty choice. Longitudinal work is required to explore whether students' career preferences change as they progress through medical school and training.