During the Fall 1982 semester, Purdue pharmacy students elected to participate in a 24 class-hour course that stressed instruction and practical experience in geriatric pharmacy services. A major course project was the step-by-step development and presentation of an inservice educational program. (Author/MLW)

The University of Houston College of Optometry external clinical program, which provides fourth year students with multidisciplinary clinical activities in facilities serving underserved areas, is described. The multidisciplinary practice setting allows the students to learn about the role of the optometrist and to communicate with other health…

In standardized patient-based tests of clinical competence, patients are used to present the clinical problem and to rate the actions taken by the student. This approach is evaluated by a microanalysis of 1 case used in a fourth year clinical examination of 98 medical students at the University of Manitoba. (MLW)

Interrater reliability in numerical ratings of clerkship performance (n=1,482 students) in five surgery programs was studied. Raters were classified as accurate or moderately or significantly stringent or lenient. Results indicate that increasing the proportion of accurate raters would substantially improve the precision of class rankings. (MSE)

A multi-faceted Rasch measurement (MFRM) approach was used to analyze clinical performance ratings of 24 first-year residents in one surgery residency program in Thailand to investigate three types of rater effects: leniency, rater inconsistency, and restriction of range. Faculty from 14 surgical services rated the clinical performance of…

A multi-faceted Rasch measurement (MFRM) model was used to analyze a clinical skills assessment of 173 fourth-year medical students in a Midwestern medical school to investigate four types of rater errors: leniency, inconsistency, halo, and restriction of range. Each student performed six clinical tasks with six standardized patients (SPs), who…

The ways in which experience and academic training influence the types of questions therapists ask of their clients were studied. Psychologists and psychology students of varying degrees of expertise (n=138) were provided an artificial intelligence program that simulated a date rape client's responses to typed questions and were asked to conduct a…

The interview process was studied to uncover the relationship of expertise in psychotherapy to the likelihood of accurate diagnosis. Experience and training affect the number of diagnostic questions clinicians ask as compared to personal, family, social, occupational, and history questions; and this in turn affects the accuracy of the diagnoses…

The Vanderbilt Summer Research Program in diabetes, which was designed to interest medical students in research careers and diabetes care, was evaluated. The program provides stipends to 20 sophomore and junior medical students for 12 weeks of preceptor-supervised laboratory research work, clinical experience, and classroom instruction. The…

In science education and in clinical education, there now exists strong evidence of an imbalance between the theoretical and the practical. Schools and teaching hospitals must emphasize scholarship in their programs, and the educational value of the inpatient units of teaching hospitals must be studied. (MLW)

Teaching hospitals are caught between two modi operandi of the 1980s--cost containment and competition. The major area of conflict faced by medical school faculty are the demands of clinical practice and research. Medical students originally motivated by idealistic concerns are seduced by the specialties and subspecialties. (MLW)

The social and economic changes of Medicare and Medicaid broadened the patient base for teaching, universalized student involvement in the teaching hospital, and improved the care of both the poor and the well-to-do. (MLW)

"Clinical Nutrition in an Interdisciplinary Setting" is a course designed to introduce basic nutrition knowledge and concepts of nutritional assessment, counseling, and intervention in the clinical care of patients. Provides a brief course overview and descriptions of its development, use, and preliminary evaluation of the patient simulation…

The opportunities for clinical research in meeting the needs of the aging (provision of pharmaceutical services for the elderly, pharmacotherapeutics in the elderly, and pharmaceutical aspects of health and illness behaviors of the elderly) are appropriate and realistic activities for pharmacists that should contribute to achieving research…

Previous research has shown that expert physicians' diagnostic performance improves when contextual information about a patient is available, while the performance of novices is not influenced by this source of information. These results are explained by supposing that experts' knowledge is organized in illness-scripts. This study examined this…