Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges
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To identify and describe the design, implementation, and evidence of effectiveness of leadership training interventions for health care action (HCA) teams, defined as interdisciplinary teams whose members coordinate their actions in time-pressured, unstable situations. ⋯ Leadership training targeting HCA teams has become more prevalent. Determining best practices in leadership training is confounded by variability in leadership definitions, absence of supporting frameworks, and a paucity of robust assessments.
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Ineffective leadership during cardiopulmonary resuscitation ("code") can negatively affect a patient's likelihood of survival. In most teaching hospitals, internal medicine residents lead codes. In this study, the authors explored internal medicine residents' experiences leading codes, with a particular focus on how gender influences the code leadership experience. ⋯ Ideal code leadership embodies highly agentic, stereotypical male behaviors. Female residents employed strategies to better integrate the competing identities of code leader and female gender. In the future, residency training should acknowledge how female gender stereotypes may conflict with the behaviors required to enact code leadership and offer some strategies, such as those used by the female residents in this study, to help women integrate these dual identities.
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Mobile health (mHealth) technologies have experienced a recent surge in attention because of their potential to transform the delivery of health care. This enthusiasm is partly due to the near ubiquity of smartphones and tablets among clinicians, as well as to the stream of mobile medical apps and devices being created. ⋯ In this commentary the authors describe the opportunities, applications, and challenges of mHealth apps and devices in medical education and argue that medical schools should make efforts to integrate these technologies into their curricula. By not doing so, medical educators risk producing a generation of clinicians underprepared for the changing realities of medical practice brought on by mHealth technologies.
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Multicenter Study
Enhancement of health research capacity in Nigeria through north-south and in-country partnerships.
Research productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa has the potential to affect teaching, student quality, faculty career development, and translational country-relevant research as it has in developed countries. Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa, with an academic infrastructure that includes 129 universities and 45 medical schools; however, despite the size, the country has unacceptably poor health status indicators. To further develop the research infrastructure in Nigeria, faculty and research career development topics were identified within the six Nigerian universities of the nine institutions of the Medical Education Partnership Initiative in Nigeria (MEPIN) consortium. ⋯ More than 140 in-country trainers subsequently presented nine courses to more than 1,600 faculty, graduate students, and resident doctors throughout the consortium during the program's first three years (2011-2013). This model has fostered a new era of collaboration among the major Nigerian research universities, which now have increased capacity for collaborative research initiatives and improved research output. These changes, in turn, have the potential to improve the nation's health outcomes.