For lecturers, much focus is placed on improving the visual display and factual content of your talk.
As much as people talk about “Death by Powerpoint”, many of us still use Powerpoint despite its many shortcomings. So how can we make our Powerpoint talks better?
This video reviews 5 great rules to live by. Interestingly, this dynamic video was built using Powerpoint by Nancy Duarte from Duarte Design. Of note, Duarte Design was the company behind the stunning slides which Al Gore used to present his compelling talk on An Inconvenient Truth.
Medicine is as much about Science as it is about Art. This is no better illustrated than an educational intervention study about “contextualizing” patient care, published in JAMA.
It is the “process of identifying individual patient circumstances (their context) and, if necessary, modifying the plan of care to accommodate those circumstances”. In other words, this is care beyond the evidence-based guidelines, beyond standardized quality measures, and beyond the checklists.
An email mailing list (or listserv) is a great way to communicate with a large group of people. Once you subscribe to a mailing list, an email sent to a single, common email address will be distributed to everyone who is subscribed to the list. You can find lists for nearly everything and anything!
There are a multitude of lists for various medical specialties. These lists unite people from all over the country (and world) from various practice backgrounds such as academic/community medical centers to rural hospitals/clinics. We are all connected by the power of the internet. The lists are a great way to generate discussion on clinical cases, the newest literature and the experiences of the list’s members.
Wishful Thinking in Medical Education
I recently came upon this great blog by Dr. Anne Marie Cunningham, a general practitioner and Clinical Lecturer at Wales, UK. She has some really insightful posts about education, its future, and the use of new technologies. This blog has been in existence since 2008. Just as interesting are the tons of comments that she gets from a spectrum of readers. Check it out!
She is also extremely active on Twitter with over 2,000 followers (@amcunningham).
Do you have medical students rotating in your Emergency Department? Are they allowed to document in the medical record?
Charting in the medical record is the cornerstone of clinical communication. You document your findings, your clinical reasoning, and management plan. The medical record allows communication amongst providers. Chart documentation is a crucial skill that every medical student should know, as stated by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC).
Well, it’s an inevitable part of working in an Emergency Department. I got a subpoena recently and now have to go in to testify on a trauma patient. I’ve gotten a few subpoenas before on trauma patients, but fortunately most cases were settled out of court.
First of all, I think it’s an ethical responsibility of emergency physicians to describe what we saw and did in the care of the injured patient in the legal system. However, I have found that the few lawyers I have interacted with slowly expand their scope of questions to cover things NOT in the medical chart. Has this happened to anyone else? They essentially start to ask me things which an “expert witness” should answer. Expert witnesses receive expert witness fees. (more…)