When President Barack Obama tapped Dr. Regina Benjamin, a rural Alabama family physician, to serve as U.S. Surgeon General, she joked that her client base went overnight from several hundred to nearly 300 million. Dr. Benjamin, an alumna of historically Black Xavier University of Louisiana and Morehouse School of Medicine, was busy tending to the…

In Brazil, recent regulations require changes in private and public health systems to make special services available to deaf patients. In the present article, the researchers analyze the perceptions of 25 sign language-using patients regarding this assistance. The researchers found communication difficulties between these patients and health…

The MFT core competencies and latest COAMFTE accreditation standards usher in a new paradigm for MFT education. This transition necessitates not only measuring student mastery of competencies but also, more importantly, adopting a contemporary pedagogical model. This article provides an overview of the changes, a review of parallel trends in other…

All faculty regardless of discipline or school need to be highly competent at writing for an academic audience. The "publish or perish" pressure is alive and well for academic advancement, publications, and external grant funding. Yet few faculty, particularly in the health professions and sciences, receive formal training on the craft…

The heightened demand for accountability, access, and quality performance from health care professionals has resulted in linkages between continuing education (CE), performance improvement (PI), and outcomes. CE health professionals must also expand their skills and abilities to design, implement, and measure CE activities consistent with these…

The education mission of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is to train health professionals to benefit VA and the United States. One approach for achieving that mission, along with VA's research and clinical missions, was the establishment of Geriatric Research, Education and Clinical Centers (GRECCs) in 1975. These were developed at VA…

The purpose of our article is to illustrate the use of mixed methods research as necessary to uncover maximum information and perspective, increase corroboration of the data, and render less biased and more accurate conclusions. This study used the case study method to closely examine the people, issues, programmes and topics related to the…

Engineering and teaching are among the most lopsided disciplines in academe's gender split. In 2010, women received 80 percent of the undergraduate degrees awarded in education, the U.S. Education Department reports. And they earned 77 percent of the master's and 67 percent of the doctoral degrees in that field. In engineering, by contrast, women…

The authors evaluated a health careers program in a U.S. urban public high school. After small subgroups of the original sample were removed, participants included 162 Asian American and Pacific Islander students. Analyses of covariance indicated that, compared with the comparison group, the treatment group reported significantly higher levels of…

Counseling, as have other mental health professions, has undergone regular historical alternations between meaning-based and reductive ideologies of helping. Contemporarily, counseling is participating in a protracted reductionistic phase. This situation has resulted in the marginalization of those in the profession who have humanistic…

The effectiveness of individualized feedback on rater behavior has been investigated in several previous studies (e.g. Elder, Knoch, Barkhuizen, & von Randow, 2005; Lunt, Morton, & Wigglesworth, 1994; O'Sullivan & Rignall, 2007; Wigglesworth, 1993). The findings of these studies are somewhat inconclusive. However, all of these studies investigated…

Introduction: Recent research suggests that effective interprofessional communication and collaboration can positively influence patient satisfaction and outcomes. Health professional communication skills do not necessarily improve over time but can improve with formal communication skills training (CST). This article describes the development,…

At Southern Vermont College (SVC) and at the nation's other colleges and universities, Anatomy and Physiology I (A&PI) is the gateway course into healthcare careers. Disturbingly, at SVC and elsewhere, many first-year students interested in healthcare careers do not succeed in this course. They withdraw from the course or the institution, or…

Most academic programmes that prepare students for the health professions have a long history of involving patients in teaching and learning. Until recently such involvement has been largely passive, but the last 20 years have seen major growth in the number and diversity of educational initiatives in which patients play an active role as…

Introduction: Health professionals are working in an era of social technologies that empower users to generate content in real time. This article describes a 3-part continuing education minicourse called "Friending Facebook?" undertaken at Penn State Hershey Medical Center that aimed to model the functionality of current technologies in…