Learning to take safe and effective action in complex settings rife with uncertainty is essential for patient safety and quality care. Doing so is not easy for trainees, as they often consider certainty to be a necessary precursor for action and subsequently struggle in these settings. Understanding how skillful clinicians work comfortably when…

Assessment of practical clinical skills is essential in the health fields. Objective Structured Clinical Exams (OSCEs), where examiners assess students performing clinical procedures on simulated patients (actors), are central to the evaluation of practical skills. However, traditional OSCEs require considerable time-investment to administer, and…

Two main objectives were set by the group of eight students and an instructor the exploration of feelings and attitudes by the student toward his own dying and death and an appreciation of what the experience of dying is like in order to facilitate the development of the student's sensitivity to the needs of the dying patient and his family.…

Background and purpose: Data supporting the predictive validity of the medical school admission interview are mixed. This study tested the hypothesis that the admission interview is predictive of interpersonal interactions between medical students and standardized patients. Method: We determined correlations between admission interview scores and…

Clinical experiences in medical education offer more relevant experiences to students. (HS)

Health maintenance organizations (HMOs) medical directors and academics (N=450) explored the barriers to and incentives for cooperation between academic medical centers (AMCs) and HMOs in clinical education. AMCs need to be prepared to offer meaningful academic and financial inducements to attract HMOs to participate in teaching. (Author/MLW)

For the past eight years at Harvard Medical School, students have viewed the behavioral science course as an introduction to psychiatry and to the doctor-patient relationship in much the same way as pathophysiology has served to introduce medicine. Course organization and effectiveness are reviewed briefly. (LBH)

Many educators emphasize the teaching value of patient contact for the medical trainee, but only a few have considered the value or harm to patients who participate in a teaching exercise. This question was investigated by evaluating the responses of patients participating in training interviews. (MLW)

A survey of 222 obstetrics patients assisted by medical clerkship students from the University of Vermont and 78 who refused student participation found privacy the primary motivation for refusal and a desire to contribute to students' education a primary reason for accepting student participation. Patients frequently erroneously anticipated the…

Describes an evaluation plan and preliminary results for the ATS-6 satellite interactive telecommunication program for teaching basic science and clinical diagnosis at sites remote from an established medical school (University of Washington). This study assesses the technical feasibility, interaction characteristics of the education programs, and…