Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges
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The term academic continuing medical education (CME) is defined and explored from the perspective of forces that have made its usage necessary. These forces include the new understandings of the place, impact, and scope of CME, and, in particular, the increasing entrepreneurial interests in the field, unrelated to the improvement of physicians' competence or performance, or to health care outcomes. In addition to principles of CME provision promulgated by the Accreditation Council of CME, and those of ethical CME providers, academic CME implies the critical appraisal of the providers' activities, the creation of new knowledge about how physicians learn and change, and the dissemination of information based on such knowledge. Finally, the nature of academic CME providers is discussed, and the potential role of CME in fostering the social contract between the medical professional and society is explored.
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A training program in universal precautions was developed and implemented in 1991-92 for second-year students at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences. The students were required to participate in a three-hour session that consisted of lecture, demonstration, and practice components focused on the risks of bloodborne-disease exposure and the techniques of phlebotomy and intravenous insertion using universal precautions. ⋯ The training session significantly improved the students' knowledge and sense of their own competency.
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To examine the choices of career paths of women in internal medicine, specifically to determine (1) whether women continue to prefer primary care practice more often than men do and (2) whether differences in career paths between men and women result from differences in the natures of the training programs they complete. ⋯ The women pursued primary-care-oriented internal medicine to a significantly greater degree than did the men, regardless of the type of training program completed (primary care or traditional).
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This study addressed the questions of whether medical students' cumulative grade-point averages (GPAs) correlate with the performance assessments (overall and in specific areas of competency) that they receive as interns from their internship program directors, and whether the students' self-assessments of preparedness for internship correlate with their internship directors' overall assessments. A questionnaire to assess interns' competencies was developed and sent to the directors of the internship programs of the 283 1990 and 1991 graduates of the Medical College of Georgia School of Medicine who consented to participate in the study (82% of the graduates). Eighty percent of the program directors responded. ⋯ The correlations of GPAs with the specific areas of competencies ranged from .28 to .51. The correlation between the mean ratings of the program directors and the mean self-ratings of the interns was .58. The data support the conclusions that medical school academic performance relates significantly to performance in internship and that interns do not rate themselves as highly as their program directors do.
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CARCS (computer-assisted resident candidate selection) is a database application developed in 1983 at the Department of Anesthesiology of the Medical University of South Carolina to deal with the greatly increased quantity of applicant information. This article relates a representative sample of CARCS data to the process of selecting residents in general. ⋯ The results support the view of medical educators that the traditional academic criteria are not sufficiently predictive of clinical performance or interpersonal skills. Research relating residents' performances to personality, learning style, and other neuropsychological factors may provide needed alternatives to knowledge testing by developing combined cognitive-noncognitive profiles. The anesthesiology clerkship experience is now almost universal among applicants and could be structured to provide pertinent information about potential residents through direct observation as well as behavioral testing.