A practical approach to mentoring students with repeated performance deficiencies.

Background: With the increasing use of competency-based evaluations we now have more and better ways to identify performance deficiencies in our learners. Yet the emphasis placed on identifying deficiencies appears to exceed that given to improving these deficiencies.

Aims: Here we describe the program at the University of Calgary for mentoring students with repeated performance deficiencies.

Rater variables associated with ITER ratings.

Advocates of holistic assessment consider the ITER a more authentic way to assess performance. But this assessment format is subjective and, therefore, susceptible to rater bias. Here our objective was to study the association between rater variables and ITER ratings.

Resident training in the psychiatric emergency service: duty hours tell only part of the story.

Background: Psychiatry residents in North America are generally required to work on-call on the psychiatric emergency service (PES) during training. Resident discontent with the long hours, onerous case loads, and lack of on-call teaching has been reported as a barrier to PES training. Given that the PES is a longitudinal and important experience, we sought to develop a better understanding of this service from the resident perspective and identify factors that affect residents as they work and train in this area.

"How am I doing?": many problems but few solutions related to feedback delivery in undergraduate psychiatry education.

Objective: Giving performance feedback to students in psychiatry requires particular delicacy and skill since a critique of the subjective artistry of the psychiatric interview may be felt more personally than a critique of an objective skill, such as eliciting a reflex or applying a stethoscope to the chest. Thus, one would expect that psychiatrists 1) are adept at giving feedback and 2) have written about the nuances of feedback delivery in psychiatric education. After a curricular needs assessment in our program revealed that feedback delivery was being neglected at all levels of training, a review of the medical education literature was conducted to find explanations for preceptor difficulty with performance feedback delivery in undergraduate psychiatric education.