Medical teacher
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Effective patient-provider communication is crucial to achieving good health care outcomes. To accomplish this with patients of limited English proficiency, learning to work effectively with interpreters is essential. ⋯ Our findings highlight the feasibility and usefulness of training students to work effectively with interpreters. Evaluation and feedback from students and faculty have been positive. Cost for this curriculum enhancement was reasonable, making it feasible to introduce the training into a wide variety of medical and allied health programs.
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The Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine was designed to encourage medical students to pursue careers as physician investigators. Our faculty decided that assessment should enhance learning and adopted only formative assessments to document student performance in relation to nine broad-based competencies. No grades are used to judge student performance throughout the 5-year program. Instead, assessments are competency-based, relate directly to performance standards, and are stored in e-Portfolios to track progress and document student achievement. The class size is limited to 32 students a year. ⋯ Using assessment data for formative purposes may encourage application and integration of knowledge, help students identify performance gaps, foster student development of learning plans and promote student responsibility for learning. Discussion provides applications for institutions with larger classes to consider.
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Disaster and bioterrorism preparedness is poorly integrated into the curricula of internal medicine residency programs. Given that victims may present to a variety of healthcare venues, including primary care practices, inpatient hospital wards, and intensive care units, we developed a curriculum to address this need. ⋯ In this pilot study, a disaster-preparedness curriculum including simulation-based training had a positive effect on residents' knowledge base and ability to respond to disaster. However, this effect had diminished after one year, indicating the need for reinforcement at regular intervals.
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Changes in UK Junior Doctor working patterns, reduced training hours and increased patient expectations have resulted in less exposure of Juniors to surgical procedures. Validated methods of assessment are therefore required to assure the surgical competency of future Consultants. Objective Structured Assessment of Technical Skills (OSATS) forms are one possible tool. ⋯ Trainees and trainers perceive OSATS to be a valuable and valid tool for the objective assessment of surgical skills in the work place. More research is required to assess their criterion-related, content, construct and predictive validity as well as their reliability in the workplace.
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Medical boards around the world face the challenge of creating competency-based postgraduate training programs. Recent legislation requires that all postgraduate medical training programmes in The Netherlands be reformed. In this article the Dutch Advisory Board for Postgraduate Curriculum Development shares some of their experiences with guiding the design of specialist training programs, based on the Canadian Medical Educational Directives for Specialists (CanMEDS). ⋯ Finally, for each task an assessment method is chosen to focus on a limited number of CanMEDS roles. This leads to a three step training cycle: (i) based on their in-training assessment and practices, trainees will gather evidence on their development in a portfolio; (ii) this evidence stimulates the trainee and the supervisor to regularly reflect on a trainee's global development regarding the CanMEDS roles as well as on the performance in specific tasks; (iii) a personal development plan structures future learning goals and strategies. The experiences in the Netherlands are in line with international developments in postgraduate medical education and with the literature on workplace-based teaching and learning.