Postgraduate medical journal
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In early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic swept through the UK and had a major impact on healthcare services. The Birmingham hand centre, one of the largest hand trauma units in the country, underwent a dramatic service reconfiguration to enable robust and safe provision of care that would withstand the peak of the pandemic. Streamlining our service significantly reduced patient footfall and hospital admission while preventing intra-hospital viral transmission. Many of the changes implemented have been kept as permanent adjustments to our practice as this new model of care yields higher patient satisfaction and efficacy to withstand the pressures of further peaks in the pandemic.
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It is unclear whether previously developed frameworks for effective consultation apply to requests initiated by alphanumeric text page. We assessed a random sample of 210 text paged consult requests for communication of previously described 'essential elements' for effective consultation: reason for consult, level of urgency and requester contact information. ⋯ In ordinal logistic regression, reason for consult was most strongly associated with quality (OR 22.4; 95% CI 8.1 to 61.7), followed by callback number (OR 6.2; 95% CI 0.8 to 49.5), caller's name (OR 5.0; 95% CI 1.9 to 13.1) and level of urgency (OR 3.3; 95% CI 1.6 to 6.7). Results suggest that text paged consult requests often include most informational elements, and that urgency, often missing, may not be as 'essential' for text pages as it was once thought to be.
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Identifying costs and values in healthcare interventions as well as the ability to measure and consider costs relative to value for patients are pivotal in clinical decision-making and medical education. This study explores residents' preferences in educating value-based healthcare (VBHC) during postgraduate medical education. Exploring residents' preferences in VBHC education, in order to understand what shapes their choices, might contribute to improved medical residency education and healthcare as a whole. ⋯ When optimising graduate and postgraduate medical education curricula, these preferences should be considered to create necessary conditions for the facilitation and participation of residents in VBHC education and the set-up of VBHC initiatives.
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The purpose of this study was to examine postgraduate students' perceptions of assessment feedback. Using the Critical Incident Technique, students enrolled on a taught clinical course were asked for their perceptions of effective and ineffective examples of assessment feedback. The data were analysed using thematic analysis and nine themes emerged that capture perceptions associated with feedback content and feedback process. ⋯ Students perceived feedback to be ineffective when it focused on grammatical errors rather than content, when it was provided by anonymous graders and if it was too personal. Timeliness of feedback was also important to participants. Practical implications and suggestions for future research are highlighted in this paper.