In 2010, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching published recommendations for the future reform of medical education. This same Carnegie Foundation had also commissioned and published the landmark 1910 Flexner report 1 on medical education, exactly 100 hears prior.
Here is a summary of the four major recommendations:
Teaching professionalism in a formal curriculum is so much different than demonstrating professionalism in the Emergency Department. So much of what students and residents learn about professionalism are from observed behaviors of the attending physicians — that is, the hidden curriculum.
In a qualitative study assessing medical student reflection essays during an EM clerkship, the authors (my friends Dr. Sally Santen and Dr. Robin Hemphill) found some startling results. The instructions to the medical students were to “think about an aspect of professionalism that has troubled you this month. Write a minimum of one half-page reflection describing what was concerning and how you might handle it.”
I came across this great SlideShare set on some simple rules on slide design to make your Powerpoint-based talk great. Think of your favorite speakers (i.e. the Mattus and Weingarts) and inevitably part of the reason they are so great is because of their slide design.
At the CDEM meeting during the SAEM national meeting this past week, the keynote speaker (Dr. Charles Hatem from Harvard) mentioned a great editorial article called “Inconvenient Truths About Effective Clinical Teaching.”
Here’s a summary of the opinion article from Lancet:
The national SAEM meeting in Boston just concluded and was a success. As part of the SAEM Social Media Committee, I was encouraged to see how many people were tweeting events from the meeting. Check out the tweets with the #SAEM11 hashtag.
To view beyond the most recent 100 tweets, you can view here.
Two weeks before renewing your license, you realize that you’re short 7 CME credits. Uh-oh…what to do now? Unfortunately, not enough time to go to a conference. Reading always gets boring after a while. Lie on your renewal application (NOT!)? If only there was a one-stop method of getting a variety of CME to keep you interested.
“To be or not to be?”
What could be more strange on a medical school curriculum than a theater training course? The authors of this study in Medical Humanities innovatively designed a 1-week elective course to help medical students at Mayo Medical School to improve their case presentation skills in partnership with the Guthrie Theater.
In this pilot course, seven medical students (six 1st year students, one 4th year student) participated. The learning objectives were:
Students were evaluated for the following competencies:
Eleven sessions, over 25 hours, comprised of the following topics:
Survey responses uniformly found that students valued this creative, non-traditional approach to learning about interpersonal communications and oral presentations. The art of focused storytelling to an audience is exactly what physicians do every day when presenting clinical cases.
Reference
Hammer RR, et al. Telling the Patient’s Story: using theatre training to improve case presentation skills. Medical humanities. 2011, 37(1), 18-22. PMID: 21593246
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