Medical teacher
-
Medical students need to learn how to recognize and manage critically ill patients; to communicate in critical situations with patients, families, and the healthcare team; and finally, to integrate technical knowledge with communication skills in caring for these patients. Meeting their needs will help prepare them to demonstrate, as physicians, the ability to synthesize information while simultaneously caring for patients, that the American Medical Association recently characterized as vital. ⋯ It is feasible to integrate the teaching of communication skills with the recognition and management of critically ill patients. The next step will be to revise the curriculum to address student deficiencies and to evaluate its effectiveness more rigorously.
-
Medical educators are increasingly faced with directives to teach Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) skills. Because of its nature, integrating fundamental EBM educational content is a challenge in the preclinical years. ⋯ This study provides evidence that the integration of an educational EBM search tool can be positively received by preclinical medical students.
-
The use of an objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) has been a powerful influence on doctor training but assessments do not always drive study behaviour in predictable ways. ⋯ The expectation that an OSCE drives learning into the clinical workplace was not supported by this study. This suggests the role of clinical experience in helping students prepare for the exam may be more subliminal, or that an OSCE is more as a test of psychomotor skills than a marker of clinical experience. An unexpected benefit may be to drive more collaborative learning.
-
In response to a change in health and societal need, the system of medical education in Japan has undergone major reform within the last two decades. Although the general health status of Japanese citizens ranks amongst the highest in the world, a rapidly increasingly elderly population, a social insurance system in crisis and a decrease in the number of practicing physicians is severely affecting this enviable position. ⋯ In order to produce a new breed of future doctors, Japanese medical education has undergone major reform: problem-based learning and clinical skills development has been instituted in most medical schools, more rigid assessment methods, ensuring competency and fitness to practice have been introduced, and there has been an increase in purposeful clinical attachments with a hands-on approach rather than a traditional observation model. A new postgraduate residency programme, introduced in 2004, hopes to improve general competency levels, while medical schools throughout the country are paying attention to modern medical education and faculty development.
-
PowerPoint is an application designed to help the speaker or lecturer assemble professional looking slides to be used in oral presentations. The result sadly is often an unending stream of slides with bullet lists, animations that obscure rather than clarify the point and cartoons that distract from rather than convey the message. ⋯ For most speakers, however, the problem is not with PowerPoint but with how they make use of it. Three approaches to making presentations using PowerPoint are described which should yield rich rewards and a more attentive and appreciative audience.