Teaching and learning in medicine
-
Comparative Study
Prevalence of resident burnout at the start of training.
Job burnout is characterized by emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and feelings of decreased personal accomplishment, and it may be linked to depression and suboptimal patient care. Burnout among American internal medicine residents ranges between 55% and 76%. ⋯ Our study found higher levels of burnout among beginning medical interns than reported in the literature. Burnout correlated with some self-reported personality features.
-
Incorporation of evidence based medicine into the undergraduate curriculum varies from school to school. The purpose of this study was to determine if an online course in evidence based medicine run concurrently with the clinical clerkships in the 3rd year of undergraduate medical education provided effective instruction in evidence based medicine (EBM). ⋯ Medical students successfully acquired and independently applied EBM skills following extended, online, faculty mentored instruction. This method of instruction provided uniform instruction across geographic sites and medical specialties and permitted efficient use of faculty time.
-
Night float rotations are being increasingly used in the era of resident physician work-hour regulations, but their impact on resident education is not clear. ⋯ Internal medicine residents at a university-based program have negative opinions regarding the educational value of night float rotations. Further work is necessary to determine whether problems exist across programs and specialties.
-
Assessment in the context of uncertainty using the script concordance test: more meaning for scores.
The Script Concordance Test (SCT) uses authentic, ill-defined clinical cases to compare medical learners' judgment skills with those of experienced physicians. SCT scores are meant to measure the degree of concordance between the performance of examinees and that of the reference panel. Raw test scores have meaning only if statistics (mean and standard deviation) describing the panel's performance are concurrently provided. ⋯ This transformation method proposes a common metric basis for reporting SCT scores and provides examinees with clear, interpretable insights into their performance relative to that of physicians of the field. We recommend reporting SCT scores with the mean and standard deviation of panel scores set at standard scores of 80 and 5, respectively. Beyond SCT, our transformation method may be generalizable to the scoring of other test formats in which the performance of examinees and those of a panel of reference undertaking the same cognitive tasks are compared.