The engagement chasm: Time for competency-based training in employee engagement for healthcare and beyond.

Background: Employee disengagement in healthcare and business is currently at unexceptionally high levels worldwide. Disengagement negatively impacts productivity, profitability, efficiency (waste reduction), innovation, quality, customer satisfaction and experience, staff well-being, safety, mortality, staff attendance, and turnover. Despite its serious detrimental impacts, no dedicated competency-based training curriculum exists for engagement as a competency.

A Systems Thinking approach for the creation of effective competency-based medical education programs.

Successful and sustainable implementation of Competency-based Medical Education (CBME) programs is a significant and daunting challenge facing medical education worldwide. Our manuscript endorses for the first time, Systems Thinking as a concept for transforming and redesigning CBME programs employing the full 7-system elements as advocated by the Biomatrix Systems Theory. The majority of internationally recommended actions and processes for such an endeavor are highlighted, each within its system element.

Competency-structured case discussion in the morning meeting: enhancing CanMEDS integration in daily practice.

Outcome-focused, competency-based educational curricula have become the norm in residency training programs. The Canadian Medical Education Directives for Specialists (CanMEDS) framework is one example of such a curriculum. However, models for incorporating all the competencies in everyday clinical practice have been difficult to accomplish.

Systemic vasculitis with prolonged pyrexia, recurrent facial urticaria, skin nodules, pleural effusions and venous thrombosis: an unusual presentation of an uncommon disease.

Classically presenting with multiple or single peripheral cytopenias of variable severity, the myelodysplastic syndromes may occasionally present with bizarre manifestations that confuse the clinical picture and result in significant delays in making the correct diagnosis. We describe the case of an elderly male patient whose presentation with prolonged unexplained fever coupled with cutaneous, pulmonary and other systemic features of inflammation was finally diagnosed as having a primary myelodysplastic syndrome with associated vasculitis after a delay of 4 years.

Prolonged unconsciousness in a patient with End-stage Renal Disease.

Patients with End-stage Renal Disease being immunocompromised; are prone to a variety of infections, sometimes, rare ones, more than the general population. This fact should alert the physicians to be more vigilant and have a broader scope when considering the etiology of infections in such patients. We report the case of a 65-year-old man who had a very stormy hospital stay secondary to cerebral nocardiosis with multiple brain abscesses, prolonged unconsciousness and neurological deficits.