Medical teacher
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Patients are frequently unhappy with medical care because physicians fail to demonstrate humanistic qualities. Immersion in science is a necessary part of medical education but not sufficient. Courses in the history of medicine, the medical narrative in literature, bioethics, medicine and art, and spirituality and medicine will train physicians who will temper technological medicine with a humanistic touch. ⋯ Furthermore, the financing of medical humanities programmes is often tenuous. Medical students must come to understand that much of medical knowledge is a function of time and place, that medicine is a profoundly social enterprise and that the practice of medicine is a value-laden undertaking. The preservation of programmes in the medical humanities will reinforce the social responsibility that should be inherent in medical education.
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The UK General Medical Council (GMC) in its regulatory capacity conducts formal tests of competence (TOCs) on doctors whose performance is of concern. TOCs are individually tailored to each doctor's specialty and grade. ⋯ The blueprint described was easy to construct and is easy to use. It reflects the knowledge, skills and behaviours (learning outcomes) to be assessed. It guides commissioning of test material and enables the systematic and faithful sampling of common and important problems. The principles described have potential for wider application to blueprinting in undergraduate or clinical training programmes. Such a blueprint can provide the essential link between a curriculum and its assessment system and ensure that assessment content is stable over time.
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The portfolio assessment process is important for assessing learner achievement. ⋯ The 12 exit learning outcomes of Dundee curriculum provide an appropriate framework for the portfolio assessment process, but the content of the portfolio requires fine-tuning particularly with regard to quantity. Time allocated to examiners for the portfolio assessment process needs to be balanced against practicability. The holistic picture of the candidate provided by the process was one of its strengths.
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Competency-based education in the health care professions has become a prominent approach to postgraduate training in Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States, and many other countries. Competency frameworks devised at national and international levels have been well received, and in many cases mandated, by governing bodies. However, the teaching and assessment of competencies pose questions of practicality, validity, and reliability. ⋯ Competencies and "entrustable professional activities" (EPAs) relate to each other as two dimensions of a grid in which each EPA can be mapped back to a number of competencies. This backward visioning from EPAs to competencies is proposed as a guide to curriculum planning and assessment. The authors discuss experiences with this conceptual model in research, curriculum development and learner assessment.