Medical teacher
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Increasingly, medical students are being taught acute medicine using whole-body simulator manikins. ⋯ These assessments proved easy to administer and we have gone some way to demonstrating construct validity and reliability. We have made the material available on a simulator website to enable others to reproduce these assessments.
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Real patients are generally recruited to participate in assessment of medical students all over the world in their clinical examinations. In the past, such voluntary patients were taken for granted. However, this is no longer true nowadays. ⋯ Printed information given during recruitment, and briefing sessions conducted immediately prior to the examination are recommended to improve patients' satisfaction.
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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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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.
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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.