Medical education
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Undergraduate medical education programmes universally struggle with overfull curricula that make curricular changes quite challenging. Final content decisions are often influenced by available faculty staff, vocal champions or institutional culture. We present a multi-modal process for identifying 'need-to-know' content while leveraging curricular change, using the social and behavioural sciences (SBS) as an exemplar. ⋯ This multi-modal, several-stage process of generating need-to-know curricular content and comparing it with current practices helped promote curricular changes in SBS, a content area that has been traditionally difficult to teach and is often under-represented. It is likely that this process can be generalised to other emerging or under-represented topic areas.
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Resident doctors' (residents) well-being impacts on the medical care they provide. Despite the high prevalence of resident doctors' distress, the relationship between their well-being and the specific competencies defined by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education is poorly understood. We evaluated the association of resident well-being with medical knowledge as assessed on both a standardised test of general medical knowledge and at the end of web-based courses on a series of focused topics. ⋯ Resident well-being appears to have limited association with competence in medical knowledge as assessed following web-based courses on specific topics or using standardised general medical examinations.
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Comprehensive programme evaluation frameworks are increasingly important to inform the development of sophisticated programmes that educate the next generation of health professions education researchers. This paper highlights an innovative process undertaken by the Wilson Centre for Research in Education to evaluate its fellowship programme. This process incorporates the principles of programme theory and a framework drawn from the field of organisational development. ⋯ Lessons learned and implications for other health education programming and the practice of programme evaluation are discussed.
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Review Meta Analysis
The effectiveness of self-directed learning in health professions education: a systematic review.
Given the continuous advances in the biomedical sciences, health care professionals need to develop the skills necessary for life-long learning. Self-directed learning (SDL) is suggested as the methodology of choice in this context. The purpose of this systematic review is to determine the effectiveness of SDL in improving learning outcomes in health professionals. ⋯ Moderate quality evidence suggests that SDL in health professions education is associated with moderate improvement in the knowledge domain compared with traditional teaching methods and may be as effective in the skills and attitudes domains.