Impact of the Joint Advisory Group on Gastrointestinal Endoscopy (JAG) on endoscopy services in the UK and beyond.

The Joint Advisory Group on Gastrointestinal Endoscopy (JAG) was initially established in 1994 to standardise endoscopy training across specialties. Over the last two decades, the position of JAG has evolved to meet its current role of quality assuring all aspects of endoscopy in the UK to provide the highest quality, patient-centred care. Drivers such as changes to healthcare agenda, national audits, advances in research and technology and the advent of population-based cancer screening have underpinned this shift in priority.

The validity and reliability of a Direct Observation of Procedural Skills assessment tool: assessing colonoscopic skills of senior endoscopists.

Background: Practitioners increasingly need to be able to evidence the quality of their care and their clinical competence for purposes of recredentialing and relicensing. Although this may be accomplished by audit and performance data, detailed and robust assessments of competence may be valuable in certain circumstances.

Objective: To develop and evaluate a detailed assessment of performance of colonoscopy.

Academic training schemes reviewed: implications for the future development of our researchers and educators.

Context: There is an international crisis in academic medicine: numbers of academics are low; there is a split between teaching and research, and career progression is poorly defined. In the UK, academic career pathways have recently been reformed, but there is little readily accessible information on what a high-quality academic training scheme might comprise.

Methods: I conducted a wide review of medical and bio-psychosocial databases, coupled with a search of the grey literature.

Describing clinical teachers' characteristics and behaviours using critical incidents and repertory grids.

Context: Completion of a rating questionnaire is the method used most frequently to evaluate a teacher's performance. Questionnaires that largely assess 'high-inference' teaching characteristics, such as 'enthusiasm' and 'friendliness', require the observer to make a judgement about the teacher but do not describe what the teacher actually did and so have limited use in providing feedback. Measures of 'low-inference' teaching behaviours (i.

Predictors of quality of life in ulcerative colitis: the importance of symptoms and illness representations.

Background: Establishing predictors of quality of life (QoL) in individuals with inflammatory bowel disease could help to identify those patients who are most likely to experience poor QoL and to target therapeutic interventions appropriately. We aimed to investigate how disease-specific QoL depends on demographic, diseaserelated, and physiological markers of disease activity, cognitive representations of illness, and perceived general health status.

Methods: A total of 111 individuals completed the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Questionnaire (IBDQ), the Medical Outcomes Study 36-Item Short-Form Health Survey (SF-36), and the Illness Perception Questionnaire (IPQ).