Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges
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Editorial Comment
Practicing what we teach: in order to teach patient-centered care, we need to deliver it.
In this issue of Academic Medicine, Webster and colleagues explore the impact of a government-imposed mandate in Ontario, Canada, to limit the length of time patients can stay in the emergency department. The rule is aimed at emergency department crowding, which has been shown to result in poorer-quality care, longer hospital stays, and higher mortality. ⋯ In this Commentary, the author describes the patient experience in the typical teaching hospital emergency department, arguing that for too long, teaching institutions have given only lip service to patient-centered care in favor of traditional teaching models. It is time to rebalance the scales so that the patient's experience is a central feature of the curriculum, and putting a time limit on how long patients stay in the emergency department may be one way to do it.
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With over one million service members separating from the military over the next several years, it seems prudent to ask whether U. S. health care professionals and systems of care are prepared to evaluate and treat the obvious and more subtle injuries ascribed to military deployment and combat. ⋯ S. Department of Veterans Affairs' recent innovations in education and care delivery, which are enhancing the education of thousands of students and residents, who will be better prepared to care for veterans after receiving this training.
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Mobile health (mHealth) technologies have experienced a recent surge in attention because of their potential to transform the delivery of health care. This enthusiasm is partly due to the near ubiquity of smartphones and tablets among clinicians, as well as to the stream of mobile medical apps and devices being created. ⋯ In this commentary the authors describe the opportunities, applications, and challenges of mHealth apps and devices in medical education and argue that medical schools should make efforts to integrate these technologies into their curricula. By not doing so, medical educators risk producing a generation of clinicians underprepared for the changing realities of medical practice brought on by mHealth technologies.