Medical teacher
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Comparative Study
Comparisons of examination performance between 'conventional' and Graduate Entry Programme students; the Newcastle experience.
Knowledge assessment outcomes were compared between and across students on our Graduate Entry to Medicine (GEP) course at Newcastle (UK) and the conventional 5-year programme. Results show that Newcastle GEP students perform significantly better in these assessments than both 5-year programme students, and graduate students on the 5-year programme. There is no significant difference in these assessment scores between GEP students from different previous educational backgrounds.
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Historical Article
Competency-based medical education: theory to practice.
Although competency-based medical education (CBME) has attracted renewed interest in recent years among educators and policy-makers in the health care professions, there is little agreement on many aspects of this paradigm. We convened a unique partnership - the International CBME Collaborators - to examine conceptual issues and current debates in CBME. We engaged in a multi-stage group process and held a consensus conference with the aim of reviewing the scholarly literature of competency-based medical education, identifying controversies in need of clarification, proposing definitions and concepts that could be useful to educators across many jurisdictions, and exploring future directions for this approach to preparing health professionals. ⋯ In this paradigm, competence and related terms are redefined to emphasize their multi-dimensional, dynamic, developmental, and contextual nature. CBME therefore has significant implications for the planning of medical curricula and will have an important impact in reshaping the enterprise of medical education. We elaborate on this emerging CBME approach and its related concepts, and invite medical educators everywhere to enter into further dialogue about the promise and the potential perils of competency-based medical curricula for the 21st century.
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Physicians' empathy is generally regarded as important and attempts are made to foster empathy. However, research indicates that the medical students' empathy is often stunted during medical education, and our understanding of how empathy is modulated during medical education is limited. This critical review explores some relatively-neglected challenges in the literature on empathy development in medical education. ⋯ This may contribute to sustain a double-blinded, dichotomized clinical gaze--a clinical gaze that tends to separate biomedical aspects from human experience and understanding and to neglect existential aspects of both the physician and the patient. Empathy training and the humanities should not be situated outside the hard core of medicine, but rather foster critical discussions of the limits and strengths of biomedical paradigms throughout medicine. In this way, the gap between biomedicine and the humanities could be bridged, and empathy training could contribute both in developing physicians' general clinical perception and judgement and in preventing the widespread stunting of empathy.