Medical teacher
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Historical Article
Medical education in Australia: much has changed but what remains?
Australia is a young country in medical education terms. Traditionally courses followed a 6-year British model with a pre-clinical/clinical divide. There is no national licensing system. ⋯ There is an emerging national recognition of research and schemes to promote young researchers. The Medical Schools Outcomes Database project is providing an important impetus to career choice and outcomes research. While the period of expansion may have ceased, Australian medical education still faces considerable challenges posed by a new health care reform agenda.
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In order to address adequately basic palliative care issues, post graduate teaching programs for physicians should provide, in addition to basic knowledge in the field and clinical skills, also training in terms of orientations and skills which enable physicians to overcome their emotional difficulties as well as professional barriers. This paper presents a model of teaching and its evaluation. ⋯ The results of the evaluation indicate that this teaching program has achieved its goals by not only improving the physician's knowledge, but also causing a positive change in attitudes regarding end-of-life care. Considering our positive results it is recommended to incorporate similar training programs in physicians' post-graduate studies.
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Problems with communication and team coordination are frequently linked to adverse events in medicine. However, there is little experimental evidence to support a relationship between observer ratings of teamwork skills and objective measures of clinical performance. ⋯ These results provide prospective evidence of a positive relationship between observer ratings of team skills and clinical team performance in a simulated dynamic health care task.
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Anaesthesia is commonly taught to medical students. The duration and content of such teaching varies however and no consensus exists as to what constitutes an optimal curriculum. Anaesthetists possess the necessary knowledge and skills and operate in clinical settings suitable to provide training for medical undergraduates, especially in areas where deficiencies have been identified. This Delphi study was directed towards developing a consensus on an optimal anaesthesia, intensive care and pain medicine curriculum for medical undergraduates. ⋯ This study demonstrated support amongst respondents for an expanded role for anaesthetists in teaching medical students. An expanded teaching role for anaesthetists would take advantage of the large number of anaesthetists in Irish teaching hospitals, their enthusiasm for teaching, the frequency of patient-consultant proximity and the likely value of their teaching to student learning outcomes. The consensus reached by this study does not recommend a comprehensive anaesthesia curriculum. Rather, more emphasis has been placed on anaesthetists teaching a broader range of knowledge, skills and attitudes relevant to every newly qualified doctor.
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e-learning is established in many medical schools. However the effectiveness of e-learning has been difficult to quantify and there have been concerns that such educational activities may be driven more by novelty, than pedagogical evidence. Where some domains may lend themselves well to e-learning, clinical skills has been considered a challenging area for online learning. ⋯ Undergraduate medical students value the use of e-learning in clinical skills education, however they vary in their utilization of such learning environments. Students rate e-learning just as highly as other traditional methods of clinical skills teaching and acknowledge its integration in a blended approach. Developers of clinical skills curricula need to ensure e-learning environments utilize media that encourage deeper approaches to learning.