Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges
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Optimizing the effectiveness, efficiency, integration, and satisfaction associated with delivered health care is not only highly principled but also good business practice in an extremely competitive environment. Programs that foster quality improvement and patient safety efforts while also promoting a scholarly focus can generate the incentives and organizational recognition needed to make patient safety and quality improvement bona fide components of the academic mission. The authors describe the development, implementation, and results of a dedicated Section on Quality and Patient Safety (SQPS) within an academic anesthesiology department. ⋯ Transparency and accountability have also been powerful motivators for achieving clinician buy-in and changing behavior. Since its inception in 2007, the SQPS has initiated or managed through to completion more than 25 quality and performance improvement projects, including an intraoperative corneal injury reduction program, a wrong-sided regional anesthesia procedure, a drug-eluting coronary stent protocol, and a practice-improvement initiative for resident physicians. The SQPS has not only robustly promoted a departmental culture of quality patient care and safety but also set the standard for other departments and stakeholders within the authors' health system.
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Ultrasound training and education in medical schools is rare, and the foci of current ultrasound curricula are limited. There is a significant need for advanced ultrasound training models in medical school curricula to reduce educational burdens for physician residency programs and improve overall physician competency. The authors describe and evaluate the advanced ultrasound training program developed at The Ohio State University College of Medicine (OSU COM). ⋯ A multimodal instructional assessment approach ensures that ultrasound training yields experience with cognitive, behavioral, and constructive learning components. The authors discuss the benefits of the program as well as its challenges and future directions. The advanced ultrasound training program at OSU COM demonstrates a novel approach to providing ultrasound training for medical students, offering a feasible model for meeting training guidelines without increasing the educational requirements for residency programs.
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Patient care quality worsens during academic year turnover. Incoming interns' uneven clinical skills likely contribute to this phenomenon, known as the "July effect." The aim of this study was to evaluate the impact of a simulation-based mastery learning (SBML) boot camp on internal medicine interns' clinical skills. ⋯ An SBML boot camp allows for individualized training, assessment, and documentation of competence before interns begin providing medical care.
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The means to share educational materials have grown considerably over the years, especially with the multitude of Internet channels available to educators. This article describes an innovative use of YouTube as a publishing platform for clinical educational materials. The authors posted online a series of short videos for teaching clinical procedures anticipating that they would be widely used. ⋯ In summary, YouTube was found to provide many advantages over self-publication, particularly in terms of technical simplification, increased audience, discoverability, and analytics. In contrast to the transitory interest seen in most YouTube content, the channel has seen sustained popularity. YouTube's broadcast model diffused aspects of the relationship between educators and their learners, thereby limiting its use for more focused activities, such as continuing medical education.