Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges
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The University of Minnesota Internal Medicine Residency Program has developed ambulatory general medicine rotations in rural community settings and urban managed care settings in Minnesota. Based on what had been learned from community focus groups, from discussions with residents about what they perceived to be training holes in the traditional curriculum, and from resident evaluations of pilot rotations, an educational framework for the rotations was established. ⋯ The community practice setting has offered a unique, important, and previously untapped resource for residency training, and the community rotations have been highly valued both by housestaff and by community preceptors. As residency programs begin to offer more community-based ambulatory care opportunities for their trainees, the impact of this trend on quality of training, residents' career choices, and patient outcomes will need to be evaluated.
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Measuring critical-appraisal skills is a key step in assessing physicians' abilities to engage in self-directed learning. The authors developed an instrument to evaluate the abilities of residents to critically appraise a journal article. ⋯ After further validation in other settings, the assessment instrument in this study may be used to objectively assess critical-reading skills. It may also provide feedback and measure outcomes for interventions designed to improve critical reading.