Article review: Evaluating your written evaluation of a learner

As a new faculty, one of the first challenges that I encountered was completing evaluation forms for medical students and residents. In our department, a Daily Evaluation Card (DEC) is to be completed at the end of every shift for each learner. These DEC’s are then collated by the program directors to yield a summative final rotation evaluation.

What I wondered was: how can I best use these DEC’s to help learners progress as medical professionals and at the same time provide critical information for the PD’s?

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By Hans Rosenberg, MD|2016-11-15T22:24:53-08:00Nov 7, 2011|Education Articles, Medical Education|

G-Advising: Using Google Hangout to advise medical students

Get an advisor.

Don’t try to navigate medical school and residency on your own.

This is key especially during medical school as you try to get through and around the mounds of reading, paperwork, options, and pitfalls. If you are interested in Emergency Medicine (EM) as a career, that means getting one or several great EM advisors. Don’t rely on non-EM faculty to give you any insight into EM. Inevitably, I have found that they give incomplete or slightly skewed perspectives about the pros and cons of EM.

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By Michelle Lin, MD|2016-11-11T18:51:55-08:00Oct 26, 2011|Medical Education, Social Media & Tech|

Remembering Dr. Robert Buckman

For those who trained in Canada (especially Toronto), the name of Dr. Robert Buckman always brought a chuckle. He filled his lectures with his signature British wit and humour. Yet, the message was always loud and clear. Being an oncologist, he had great insight in communication with patients.

He was the first to teach us medical students about communication and professionalism: Kindness, empathy, delivering bad news, what to say when you don’t know what to say. A decade later, out of the countless hours of lectures, his stood out.

Truly a big loss to the medical educators community.

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By Stella Yiu, MD|2016-11-11T18:51:56-08:00Oct 13, 2011|Medical Education|

Poll: YOU are on the residency selection committee. What would YOU do?

As an attending physician, you are friends with nurses and residents on social media.

One day, you are browsing through your social media page. You came across a photo of a student – a candidate applying to your program in fact – scantily clad, inebriated, dancing in a rave. The comments followed agreed on how wild he/she had partied and drank that night.

You are on the selection committee. Should this information be part of the assessment of the candidate?

Please explain your decision in the comments section.

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By Stella Yiu, MD|2016-11-11T18:51:57-08:00Oct 3, 2011|Medical Education|

Brief survey: Need your help with my promotions!

With all of the advances in technology and social media, the “old school” world of traditional academia doesn’t know what to do with medical professionals who incorporate technologies into their educational practices. To justify these past 2 years of blogging during my free time, I wanted to collect data on who my readers are and the impact of my blog (if any).

I could sure use a few minutes of your time and input to help with my promotions process. Let’s push traditional academia to change with the times. Thanks a bunch.

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By Michelle Lin, MD|2016-11-11T18:52:07-08:00Sep 7, 2011|Medical Education, Social Media & Tech|

EM-RAP Educator’s Podcast: How to get promoted in academic EM

Dr. Amal Mattu gives a great 47-minute lecture on “How to Get Promoted in Academic Emergency Medicine”. Catch the podcast from the talk in July’s EM-RAP Educator’s Edition. He pulls many of the lessons from his son’s kindergarten teacher.

Getting promoted in academic EM can often be a challenge and a mysterious process. Why is it some are getting promoted faster than others? What can I do to make sure I’m on track for promotion?

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By Michelle Lin, MD|2016-12-20T10:02:54-08:00Aug 9, 2011|Medical Education|

Advice for the new EM interns, part II

As a followup to a previous post on “The 10 Commandments in Emergency Medicine”, we would like to pay tribute to our pediatric friends. More than a decade after it was initially published, Timothy Givens (also from Vanderbilt but the pediatric side) published “The 10 commandments of pediatric Emergency Medicine”. Although the original commandments still hold true, the pediatric commandments augment them nicely and are geared towards our littler patients.

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By Fred Wu, MHS, PA-C|2016-11-11T19:59:20-08:00Aug 8, 2011|Medical Education|