Teaching medical students the art of medical error full disclosure: evaluation of a new curriculum.

Background: Despite the acknowledgment that error disclosure is essential to patient safety and the patient-provider relationship, there is little undergraduate training related to error disclosure.

Description: Pilot test and evaluate an educational module designed to improve student confidence in understanding and performing medical error disclosure. The training was designed to establish competency in the four Rs of apology-recognition, responsibility, regret, and remedy-and included a 3-hr interactive discussion, training DVDs, practice of full disclosure using standardized patients, and facilitated reflection.

Designing a patient safety undergraduate medical curriculum: the Telluride Interdisciplinary Roundtable experience.

Purpose: Patient safety has emerged as a global concern in the provision of quality health care, and yet, to date, few medical schools have created and/or implemented patient safety curricula. The purpose of this article is to introduce readers to one model of a patient safety undergraduate medical curriculum, as designed by a group of experts attending an annual interdisciplinary roundtable assembled for this purpose.

Summary: The Annual Telluride Interdisciplinary Roundtable met in 2005 and 2006 to design what it considered to be a comprehensive patient safety curriculum for medical students.

Physicians who treat the elderly in rural Florida: trends indicating concerns regarding access to care.

Context: Rural elderly patients are faced with numerous challenges in accessing care. Additional strains to access may be occurring given recent market pressures, which would have significant impact on this vulnerable population.

Purpose: This study focused on the practice patterns and future plans of rural Florida physicians who routinely see elderly patients.

Rural physicians' attitudes toward the elderly: evidence of ageism?

Rural elderly patients receive health services primarily in the outpatient setting, with their primary care provider often serving as their only point of contact with the health care system. Little is known however about the attitudes of physicians, and more specifically attitudes of those practicing in rural locations, toward differing age groups of the elderly. The current study was undertaken to examine the perceptions and attitudes of rural Florida physicians who routinely provide care for the elderly.

To IRB or not to IRB?

Improving medical practice begins with the improvement of medical education. In this process, most academic medical faculty assume the dual roles of both teacher and researcher, often without intending to or realizing that they are. With the increased tightening of regulation and supervision of biomedical research in the United States, academic medical institutions and their individual faculty face the daunting regulatory compliance problems that are traditionally associated with clinical and bench research projects.

Dynamic health promotion for the geriatric population.

The documents Healthy People 2000 and its update, Healthy People 2010, have helped focus national attention on the neglected areas of disease prevention and health promotion and maintenance. Despite increasing awareness and the proliferation of research that demonstrates the effectiveness of a healthy lifestyle for disease prevention, patients and healthcare professionals continue to struggle with an effective approach to effecting healthy lifestyle strategies. The inclusion of health promotion goals into care plans seldom is enough to create positive behavioral changes in a patient.