Tomorrow's educators … today? Implementing near-peer teaching for medical students.

Background: The University of Adelaide offers a six-year undergraduate medical degree with a focus on small group learning. Senior medical students had previously received limited formal training in education skills, and were identified as an underutilised teaching resource.

Aims: To devise a programme in which senior students are exposed to the various facets of university teaching responsibilities and to evaluate its impact on both the tutors and the students.

Distress levels and self-reported treatment rates for medicine, law, psychology and mechanical engineering tertiary students: cross-sectional study.

Objective: The aim of this research was to assess tertiary student distress levels with regards to (i) comparisons with normative population data, and (ii) the effects of discipline, year level, and student characteristics. Self-reported treatment rates and level of concern regarding perceived distress were also collected.

Method: Students from all six years of an undergraduate medical course were compared with samples from Psychology, Law and Mechanical Engineering courses at the University of Adelaide, Australia.

Clinical skills education: outcomes of relationships between junior medical students, senior peers and simulated patients.

Objectives: Peer-assisted learning (PAL) has been reported to have educational benefits in cross-year, small-group teaching in other contexts. Accordingly, we explored whether senior medical students are effective tutors for their junior peers in clinical skills education, and how the participants in the learning triad (tutors, learners and simulated patients [SPs]) perceive the learning environment created in PAL.

Methods: Year 2 students were randomly allocated to one of two groups for skills training.

The Effect of an Interactive Tutorial on the Prescribing Performance of Senior Medical Students.

Objectives: To evaluate the effectiveness of small group tutorials in teaching senior medical students the requirements of prescription writing.

Design: Random allocation to interactive tutorial or didactic lecture with blinded evaluation.

Subjects: All 1999 6th year medical students, the University of Adelaide.

Efficacy and safety of antidepressants for children and adolescents.

How safe and effective are antidepressants in children and adolescents? The authors of this review have found disturbing shortcomings in the methods and reporting of trials of newer antidepressants in this patient group