Medical education
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This study aimed to identify and compare predictors of job satisfaction between instructional and clinical faculty members. ⋯ Greater emphasis must be placed on faculty members' well-being at both the institutional level and the level of departmental leadership. Efforts to enhance job satisfaction and improve retention are more likely to succeed if they are directed by locally designed assessments involving department chairs and are specifically aimed at fostering more effective mentoring relationships and increasing the opportunities available for career advancement activities such as research work. Our findings show that these strategies can have significant impacts on job satisfaction and the retention of clinical track faculty members.
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Burnout is prevalent among medical students and is a predictor of subsequent serious consideration of dropping out of medical school and suicide ideation. Understanding of the factors that protect against burnout is needed to guide student wellness programmes. ⋯ Modifiable individual factors and learning climate characteristics including employment status, stress level and perceptions of the prioritising of student education by faculty members relate to medical students' vulnerability to burnout.
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Stress and burnout are endemic in postgraduate medical training, but little research is available to guide supportive interventions. The identification of the longitudinal emotional and developmental coping needs of internal medicine residents could assist in the better design and implementation of supportive interventions. ⋯ Developmentally informed programmatic adaptations could better support the emotional growth and personal and professional development of postgraduate medical trainees. Future directions should include a controlled trial of resident support groups, assessments of 'active ingredients' (i.e. to establish which supportive interventions are most effective), and evaluations of programmatic adaptations.
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Research on objective structured clinical examinations (OSCEs) is extensive. However, relatively little has been written on the development of case-specific checklists on history taking and physical examination. Background information on the development of these checklists is a key element of the assessment of their content validity. Usually, expert panels are involved in the development of checklists. The objective of this study is to compare expert-based items on OSCE checklists with evidence-based items identified in the literature. ⋯ Expert-based, case-specific checklist items developed for OSCE stations do not coincide with evidence-based items identified in the literature. Further research is needed to ascertain what this inconsistency means for test validity.
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A key element of medical competence is problem solving. Previous work has shown that doctors use inductive reasoning to progress from facts to hypotheses and deductive reasoning to move from hypotheses to the gathering of confirmatory information. No individual assessment method has been designed to quantify the use of inductive and deductive procedures within clinical reasoning. The aim of this study was to explore the feasibility and reliability of a new method which allows for the rapid identification of the style (inductive or deductive) of clinical reasoning in medical students and experts. ⋯ This new method showed good reliability and may be a promising tool for the assessment of medical problem-solving skills, giving teachers a means of diagnosing how their students think when they are confronted with clinical problems.