A course for senior nursing students focuses on the health problems and belief systems of minority clients and how these affect their health care. Based on a holistic and epidemiological approach to health care, the seven week course includes theory and clinical practice which students found stimulating and useful. (Author/MS)

Students in undergraduate surgery at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston participated in a comparison study of bedside teaching and small group seminars. No special advantage for bedside teaching could be documented when two very similar groups of students were evaluated. (LBH)

The skills of interns in obtaining body fluids for analysis were observed after six months of a categorical internal medicine program. The results suggest that training in the proper technique in lumbar puncture in medical schools is inadequate. Recommendations for improvement are offered. (LBH)

Results of a survey of 59 U.S. and 10 Canadian dental schools indicate a potentially serious problem in obtaining and maintaining dental teaching patients to provide clinical experience for dental students, possibly compromising the clinical education process. (MSE)

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)

Recent discussion of the ethical problems of biomedical human experimentation has drawn attention to the responsibility of the medical schools for training new clinical investigators and for safeguarding the rights and welfare of the subjects of clinical research conducted in the medical schools and their affiliated hospitals. (Author)

A curriculum proposed as a framework for the education of all generalists" practicing in primary health care. (IR)

"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 valuable role that predoctoral dental and dental hygiene student involvement in specialized hospital programs can play in the educational process is described. The University of Maryland Dental School program emphasizes the involvement of students in major clinical research related to cancer patients. (Author/MLW)

The Medical College of Pennsylvania uses outstanding senior students as teaching assistants for sophomore students needing additional observation and feedback to increase clinical skills. The seniors are less threatening than faculty and may give more effective feedback. Both student groups are satisfied with the program. (MSE)

Computer-based clinical simulations used in medical education are designed according to decisions about which elements of reality to explicitly include, which to leave to imagination, and when to intervene for educational purposes. Programs offer many options for structuring the simulations, such as varying levels of volunteered information about…

The strategy used by one health maintenance organization (HMO) for balancing residents' training needs and patient health problems, often limited and routine in an HMO, is to allocate patients to residents by matching them with curriculum content. A process for handling patient resistance to such an arrangement was also instituted. (MSE)

In health care education a balance needs to be struck between theoretical and practical teaching. Undergraduates typically split their time between clinical placement and university-based teaching blocks. A proportion of the time spent in preparation for clinical practice placements will be spent in the classroom or in simulation suites. The…

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…

Noting the problem of a gap between residency training and primary care practice, the author considers five issues faced by primary care graduate education (the setting, the patients, the curriculum, the students, and the faculty) and the three disciplines involved: internal medicine, pediatrics, and family medicine. (JT)