Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges
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Clinical medical education depends on the availability of instructive patient encounters, or "good teaching cases." While all medical students hope to see enough patients of sufficient scope and variety, exposure to good teaching cases has been traditionally limited by time and chance. Students may graduate from medical school without having seen a number of important cases, each of which may represent a knowledge gap they will carry forward into internship and future patient care. Recently, however, the advent of high-fidelity patient simulators has enabled instructors to recreate realistic patient scenarios in a standardized fashion. Using the simulator, we wanted to create a medical education service-like any other clinical teaching service, but designed exclusively to help students fill in the gaps in their own education, on demand. We hoped to mitigate the inherent variability of standard clinical teaching, and to augment areas of deficiency. ⋯ Students enjoy the opportunity to practice medicine on-demand with dedicated clinical mentoring by a practicing physician. Course directors are interested in scheduling simulator time to help bring to life tutorial-based teaching cases and other course material for their students. By offering a medical education elective for residents, we have bolstered the pool of available instructors, provided a valuable learning experience for residents as teachers, and fostered additional opportunities for collaboration between the medical school and clinical training sites. Customized, realistic clinical correlates are now readily available for students and teachers, allowing reliable access to "the good teaching case."