Managing common ambulatory conditions: Exploring clinical decision making performance between pharmacists and family physicians.

Background: Prescribing is part of the expanded scope of practice for pharmacists in Alberta, Canada. Given these responsibilities, clinical decision making (the outcome from the diagnostic and therapeutic decision making process) is an essential skill for pharmacists. The current study compared diagnostic and therapeutic decision-making between Additional Prescribing Authority (APA) pharmacists and family physicians using a set of common ambulatory clinical cases that both practitioners could encounter in the community as part of their daily practice.

Experience of introducing an electronic health records station in an objective structured clinical examination to evaluate medical students’ communication skills in Canada: a descriptive study.

Purpose: There is limited literature related to the assessment of electronic medical record (EMR)-related competencies. To address this gap, this study explored the feasibility of an EMR objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) station to evaluate medical students’ communication skills by psychometric analyses and standardized patients’ (SPs) perspectives on EMR use in an OSCE.

Methods: An OSCE station that incorporated the use of an EMR was developed and pilot-tested in March 2020.

Turk Talk: human-machine hybrid virtual scenarios for professional education.

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. Virtual scenarios provide a means for creating rich and complex online cases for health professional students to explore.

Data, Big and Small: Emerging Challenges to Medical Education Scholarship.

The collection and analysis of data are central to medical education and medical education scholarship. Although the technical ability to collect more data, and medical education's dependence on data, have never been greater, it is getting harder for medical schools and educational scholars to collect and use data, particularly in terms of the regulations, security issues, and growing reluctance of learners and others to participate in data collection activities. These two countervailing trends present a growing threat to the viability of medical education scholarship.

Using the METRICS model for defining routes to scholarship in healthcare simulation.

Introduction: In this paper, we explored the utility and value of the METRICS model for modeling scholarship in healthcare simulation by: (1) describing the distribution of articles in four healthcare simulation journals across the seven areas of METRICS scholarship; and (2) appraising patterns of scholarship expressed in three programs of simulation scholarship and reflecting on how these patterns potentially influence the pursuit of future scholarly activities.

Methods: Two raters reviewed abstracts of papers published between January 2015 and August 2017 in four healthcare simulation journals and coded them using METRICS. Descriptive statistics were calculated for scholarship type and distribution across journals.

METRICS: a pattern language of scholarship in medical education.

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. Scholarly activity in health professions education has been growing steadily but despite the broad interest, quite what is considered to be scholarly activity in medical education has remained vague.

Raising the BarCamp: international reflections.

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. There is increasing interest in Barcamps and Unconferences as an educational approach during traditional medical education conferences.

Where do physicians start and end?

Medical education is primarily about training physicians and maintaining their capabilities over time. Given that physicians are the primary focus of the field, there is a need for a clear idea of what physicians are or could be. This paper seeks to explore this issue by posing the simple question: ?Where do physicians start and end?' In doing so, the authors explore a series of different conceptual frames, including those of a physician's physical dimensions, their cellular boundaries, personal intentions and beliefs, professional identity, regulation, entrustability, professional performance, extended cognition, and disability.

Mobile technologies in medical education: AMEE Guide No. 105.

Mobile technologies (including handheld and wearable devices) have the potential to enhance learning activities from basic medical undergraduate education through residency and beyond. In order to use these technologies successfully, medical educators need to be aware of the underpinning socio-theoretical concepts that influence their usage, the pre-clinical and clinical educational environment in which the educational activities occur, and the practical possibilities and limitations of their usage. This Guide builds upon the previous AMEE Guide to e-Learning in medical education by providing medical teachers with conceptual frameworks and practical examples of using mobile technologies in medical education.

Virtual patient activity patterns for clinical learning.

Background: Virtual patients are software tools that present learners with patient case situations and tasks. Some virtual patients take the learner through a guided case scenario, whereas others require learners to make diagnostic and therapeutic decisions. Much attention has been paid to the design of virtual patients and their use as standalone activities, but rather less attention has been paid to their use in broader educational activities.

Exploring digital professionalism.

The widespread use of digital media (both computing devices and the services they access) has blurred the boundaries between our personal and professional lives. Contemporary students are the last to remember a time before the widespread use of the Internet and they will be the first to practice in a largely e-health environment. This article explores concepts of digital professionalism and their place in contemporary medical education, and proposes a series of principles of digital professionalism to guide teaching, learning and practice in the healthcare professions.

Hockey lines for simulation-based learning.

Background: Simulation-based health professional education is often limited in accommodating large numbers of students. Most organisations do not have enough simulation suites or staff to support growing demands.

Context: We needed to find ways to make simulation sessions more accommodating for larger groups of learners, so that more than a few individuals could be active in a simulation scenario at any one time.

Virtual patients on the semantic Web: a proof-of-application study.

Background: Virtual patients are interactive computer simulations that are increasingly used as learning activities in modern health care education, especially in teaching clinical decision making. A key challenge is how to retrieve and repurpose virtual patients as unique types of educational resources between different platforms because of the lack of standardized content-retrieving and repurposing mechanisms. Semantic Web technologies provide the capability, through structured information, for easy retrieval, reuse, repurposing, and exchange of virtual patients between different systems.

Mining rich health data from Canadian physician claims: features and face validity.

Background: Physician claims data are one of the largest sources of coded health information unique to Canada. There is skepticism from data users about the quality of this data. This study investigated features of diagnostic codes used in the Alberta physician claims database.

YouTube as a platform for publishing clinical skills training videos.

The means to share educational materials have grown considerably over the years, especially with the multitude of Internet channels available to educators. This article describes an innovative use of YouTube as a publishing platform for clinical educational materials.The authors posted online a series of short videos for teaching clinical procedures anticipating that they would be widely used.

The one minute mentor: a pilot study assessing medical students' and residents' professional behaviours through recordings of clinical preceptors' immediate feedback.

Introduction: The assessment of professional development and behaviour is an important issue in the training of medical students and physicians. Several methods have been developed for doing so. What is still needed is a method that combines assessment of actual behaviour in the workplace with timely feedback to learners.

Practica continua: Connecting and combining simulation modalities for integrated teaching, learning and assessment.

Simulation modalities are generally used independently of one another, largely due to physical and operational limitations to integration. Recent developments are enabling simulators and simulation environments to progress beyond single intervention models towards integrated continua of simulation. Moving to greater integration can improve contextualisation, better management of the transition from individual simulation to clinical practice, and provide wider opportunities to synthesise skills and approaches to practice.

Integrating simulation devices and systems.

Simulators are typically standalone devices. The HSVO project is developing a network enabled platform control middleware and a number of integrated 'edge device' services to, among other outcomes, enable multi device and platform simulation support.

Rethinking fidelity, cognition and strategy: medical simulation as gaming narratives.

Simulations can transcend the literal representation of practice worlds. This paper considers the use of gaming and narrative to identify key underlying features and the ways in which they can be used in creating simulation activities.

Changes to general practice.

In September 2008, the Federal Minister for Health and Ageing, Nicola Roxon, announced plans to change delivery of primary health care in Australia. Ms Roxon suggested that general practitioners should 'relinquish some of the work that could be safely done by other health professionals'. The New South Wales Australian Medical Association President immediately responded by saying 'any fragmentation of primary health care to other allied health workers will mean diminution of care for patients'.

Where Canadian family physicians learn procedural skills.

Background And Objectives: Little is known about where family physicians learn procedural skills. In this study, we examine where Canadian family medicine graduates learned to do the procedures they perform.

Methods: In 2001, a cross-sectional postal survey was conducted of the 369 family medicine graduates from the University of Alberta and the University of Calgary between 1996 - 2000.

'Did everybody get that?' The challenges of international teleconferencing.

Countless hours and dollars are frittered away during teleconferences. This situation is greatly magnified when spread across international boundaries. Some simple steps can reduce this waste.