In many academic Emergency Departments, there are “off-service” or non-EM residents rotating in the department. They are sometimes invited to the EM residency conference series for the month. Often times though, they have too many departmental didactic events and obligations of their own that they don’t have time to attend formal EM didactics.
In academia, faculty are expected to do it all– clinical care, bedside teaching, formal didactics, scholarly work, and administrative projects. Asking for protected time, or release time from clinical work, from your department chair is often a difficult negotiation process, especially for junior faculty.
Fresh out of residency and fellowship training, junior faculty are just excited to get started as an academic faculty member. A downpour of exciting opportunities descends upon you, and you just can’t say no to them! A year later passes, and you realize that you are overwhelmed.
What types of methodologies are used to develop a consensus statement? I’m in the midst of helping to write a consensus statement manuscript in education and ran into this great review article. It’s from the British Medical Journal in 1995.
Basically, there are 2 general types of methodologies:
After a chaotic shift, you and your learner sit down to complete the daily evaluation card. There are no significant issues with the learner. Is there anything else to write except ‘great shift’ or ‘read more’?
Can we learn from excellent motivators such as sports coaches? This article by LeBlanc and Sherbino outlines coaching as a teaching technique in the ED.
Wait, what?!
What a terribly written test question!
Residency interview season is quickly approaching!Unique to the field of EM, letters of recommendations from EM faculty are written on a standardized form. The Standardized Letter of Recommendation (SLOR), downloadable from the CORD website, documents information about the student’s performance in the EM clerkship, qualifications, and global assessment. At the end, the letter writer can provide free-text written comments.
Similar to JAMA, which publishes an annual publication focusing on Medical Education, the Academic Emergency Medicine (AEM) journal just published a AEM-CORD/CDEM supplement focusing on EM education. I was fortunate to be involved with one of the papers published in this supplement.
This paper, written on behalf of the Clerkship Directors in EM (CDEM) and the Association of Academic Chairs of EM (AACEM), reviews the past, present, and future of EM in the U.S. medical school curriculum.
EM faculty members are playing an increasingly important role in both the preclinical and clinical curriculum. Our specialty teaches skills and knowledge, crucial for all medical students regardless of their eventual career choice. EM educators are a natural fit to teaching topics, such as the following:
Furthermore, as medical schools are looking towards restructuring their overall curriculum to incorporate more clinical exposure from day 1, the diverse, high-volume environment of the Emergency Department (ED) makes it a perfect fit for students. Recall back to when you were a first-year medical student. How amazing would it have been to observe ED patients to reinforce your learning about pharmacology, anatomy, pathology, and heart sounds?
From an institutional standpoint, the EM clerkship fulfills many of the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) educational requirements. The LCME is the regulatory body that accredits U.S. and Canadian medical schools. The LCME recognizes that the ED provides students with an unparalleled learning opportunity. Consequently, more and more schools are making EM clerkships mandatory. In 2004, about 39% of U.S. medical schools had mandatory EM clerkships for third-year medical students. There’s an ongoing CDEM study to determine the more updated numbers (I’m guessing it’ll be closer to 50%).
Medical schools are increasingly depending on the EM specialty to help with teaching students at all levels of learning. For those of us invested in medical education, this is great news.
Reference
Wald D, Lin M, Manthey D, Rogers R, Zun L, Christopher T. (2010). Emergency Medicine in the Medical School Curriculum. Academic Emergency Medicine, 17 DOI: 10.1111/j.1553-2712.2010.00896.x
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