Medical teacher
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The shift to competency-based medical education (CBME) requires a new approach to program evaluation. CBME implementers need to embed evaluation in their programs to ensure their CBME adapts to the changing demands of the healthcare system. ⋯ The paper uses examples from the College of Family Physicians of Canada's (CFPC's) evaluation of the implementation of the Triple C Competency-based curriculum in family medicine residency programs across Canada. These practical tips will be useful to medical educators looking to integrate evaluation into their CBME programs and to those considering other curriculum reform in health professions education.
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Background: As recognition of the health impacts of climate change and other environmental challenges increases, so too does the need for health care professionals to practice healthcare sustainably. Environmental sustainability in healthcare extends beyond our traditional understanding of environmental health, which is often limited to environmental hazards and disease. Health services, professional organizations, and training institutions are increasingly forming climate and sustainability position statements and policies accordingly. ⋯ Results: These 12 tips can be used to teach students and qualified health professionals in nursing, allied health, and medicine to practice healthcare in an environmentally sustainable manner. Conclusions: Empowering health professionals to practice environmentally sustainable healthcare has economic, social, health, and environmental benefits. Teaching environmental sustainability to health professionals enhances existing learning by updating curricula with the latest evidence of how environmental determinants of health are rapidly changing and enables both educators and students to make an important contribution to safeguarding human health, the environment, and healthcare for future generations.
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Palliative care is the holistic care of patients with advanced, progressive incurable illness. Palliative care is well recognized as an essential component of medical student curricula. ⋯ Using current literature, these tips aim to highlight key points necessary to facilitate the development and delivery of palliative care teaching to medical students. The key practice points include: clinical exposure to patients with palliative care needs and those that are dying, being compulsory (and integrated) across the course, summative and formative assessments to encourage learning, support from within the university for curricular time and development, visits to a hospice/inpatient palliative care facility, emphasis on clinically based learning later in the course, teaching by specialists in palliative care as well as specialists in other areas including Family Doctors/General Practitioners, innovative teaching methods and inter-professional learning to develop teaching.
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Diversity, inclusion, and equity are recognized as educational priorities and strategies for excellence across medical education. However, an inadvertent consequence of this push for best practice is that these terms are used interchangeably. This personal view intends to highlight the importance of language in an office of diversity and how it can potentially exacerbate the disparities it aims to alleviate. ⋯ On the other hand, an office of "Diversity and Equity" focuses on addressing the unique barriers that disadvantage a subset of students and faculty. This has important implications for students, faculty, staff, and administration. Moreover, this directly affects the perceptions of an institutions' diversity climate.
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Introduction: Clinical reasoning is considered to be at the core of health practice. Here, we report on the diversity and inferred meanings of the terms used to refer to clinical reasoning and consider implications for teaching and assessment. Methods: In the context of a Best Evidence Medical Education (BEME) review of 625 papers drawn from 18 health professions, we identified 110 terms for clinical reasoning. ⋯ Categories of terms included: purpose/goal of reasoning, outcome of reasoning, reasoning performance, reasoning processes, reasoning skills, and context of reasoning. Discussion: Findings suggest that terms used in reference to clinical reasoning are non-synonymous, not uniformly understood, and the level of agreement differed across terms. If the language we use to describe, to teach, or to assess clinical reasoning is not similarly understood across clinical teachers, program directors, and learners, this could lead to confusion regarding what the educational or assessment targets are for "clinical reasoning."