Medical teacher
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The ward round is the bread and butter of internal medicine. It forms the basis of clinical decision making and reviewing patients' progress. It is fundamental to the role of the internal medical physician. ⋯ Most importantly, it allows for an interaction with the patient and their relatives and is a means of relating medical information back, answer queries and plan future medical management strategies. These should be integrated into the teaching round by a senior clinician so that time away from the bedside is also used to enhance the teaching and learning experience. Here, I would like to draw on my experience as a learner as well as an educator, together with the available literature, to draw up a simple 12-step teaching strategy that should help the ward round serve the dual purpose of teaching medical students and junior doctors.
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Social responsibility and accountability can be important core values in medical education. At the University of British Columbia, undergraduate medical students engage in prison health community service-learning opportunities in regional correctional facilities. ⋯ Our findings demonstrated that pre-clinical exposure to incarcerated individuals and prison health education provided a unique setting for medical students to develop an increased sense of social responsibility and accountability.
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Doctors-in-training can now be supervised remotely by specialist clinicians using information and communication technology. This provides an intermediate stage of professional development between on-site supervision and independent medical practice. Remote supervision could increase training capacity, particularly in underserved areas and ensure doctors are willing and able to practice where they are needed once qualified. ⋯ These doctors benefit from remote supervisors who facilitate their learning, monitor their well-being, and support them holistically. Educational organisations need to oversee remote placements and match the right registrar, to the right placement with the right supervisor. We outline in our twelve tips how to set up remote supervision in order to maximise the educational benefits and minimise the risks.
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Despite acknowledgement that the Canadian Medical Educational Directives for Specialists (CanMEDS) framework covers the relevant competencies of physicians, many educators and medical professionals struggle to translate the CanMEDS roles into comprehensive training programmes for specific specialties. ⋯ The CanMEDS framework appears to offer relevant building blocks for specialty specific postgraduate training, which should be combined with the results of an exploration of specialty specific competencies to arrive at a postgraduate curriculum that is in alignment with professional practice.
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E-learning resources, such as virtual patients (VPs), can be more effective when they are integrated in the curriculum. To gain insights that can inform guidelines for the curricular integration of VPs, we explored students' perceptions of scenarios with integrated and non-integrated VPs aimed at promoting clinical reasoning skills. ⋯ The themes appear to offer starting points for the development of a framework to guide the curricular integration of VPs. Their impact needs to be confirmed by studies using quantitative controlled designs.