Development and Implementation of a Peer-Teaching Curriculum for Student Assistants.

We have developed a peer-teaching program for student assistants involved in medical education. The offer comprises (1) an inventory of potentially relevant courses offered by other institutions at our university and (2) our own peer-teaching curriculum on pedagogy and teaching methodology. We describe a pilot scheme to implement the curriculum.

Training in medical communication competence through video-based e-learning: How effective are video modeling and video reflection?

Objective: The present study investigated the efficacy of the didactic approaches of video modeling (VM, best-practice examples), video reflection (VR, problem-based approach), and the combination of both (VMR) in fostering medical communication competence in a video-based digital learning environment.

Methods: N = 126 third-year medical students who participated in the pre-post study were assigned to either the intervention groups (VM, VR, and VMR) or the wait-list control group. The efficacy of the three approaches was assessed by means of a situational judgment test (SJT) of medical communication competence.

Measuring informal workplace learning outcomes in residency training: a validation study.

Background: Informal workplace learning (WPL) has no concrete learning objective and takes place without a responsible supervisor, which makes it difficult to assess its learning outcomes. Formal learning situations, as they are known from universities or schools, do not exist in this context and make a conventional assessment of learning goals and achievements impossible. Informal learning in the workplace is of central importance, and the assessment of informal learning outcomes in medical education is an under-researched area.

Tracing COVID-19 Infection Chains Within Healthcare Institutions - Another Brick in the Wall Against SARS-CoV-2.

Early anticipation of COVID-19 infection chains within hospitals is of high importance for initiating suitable measures at the right time. Infection control specialists can be supported by application systems able of consolidating and analyzing heterogeneous, up-to-now non-standardized and distributed data needed for tracking COVID-19 infections and infected patients' hospital contacts. We developed a system, Co-Surv-SmICS, assisting in infection chain detection, in an open and standards-based way to ensure reusability of the system across institutions.

A video-based situational judgement test of medical students' communication competence in patient encounters: Development and first evaluation.

Objective: We developed and evaluated the Video-Based Assessment of Medical Communication Competence (VA-MeCo), a construct-driven situational judgement test measuring medical students' communication competence in patient encounters.

Methods: In the construction phase, we conducted two expert studies (n = 6, n = 13) to ensure curricular and content validity and sufficient expert agreement on the answer key. In the evaluation phase, we conducted a cognitive pre-test (n = 12) and a pilot study (n = 117) with medical students to evaluate test usability and acceptance, item statistics and test reliability depending on the applied scoring method (raw consensus vs.

Validation of the ComCare index for rater-based assessment of medical communication and interpersonal skills.

Objectives: To develop and validate a short instrument to assess undergraduate medical students' communication and interpersonal skills in videographed history taking situations with simulated patients.

Methods: Sixty-seven undergraduate medical students participating in an assessment including videographed physician-patient encounters for history taking with five simulated patients were included in this study. The last video of each participant's consultation hour was rated by two independent assessors with the eight-item ComCare index for assessment of communication and interpersonal skills newly designed for the external rater perspective (ComCareR).

How can communicative competence instruction in medical studies be improved through digitalization?

The teaching of communicative competence plays an increasingly important role in medical education. In addition to traditional teaching formats, such as role-plays with simulated patients, technology-based approaches become more important in medical education. Teaching materials are increasingly augmented by videos of simulated doctor-patient conversations.

Entrustable professional activities and facets of competence in a simulated workplace-based assessment for advanced medical students.

Competence-based assessment formats in medical education usually focus on individual facets of competence (FOCs). The concept of 'Entrustable Professional Activities' (EPAs) encompasses supervisors' decisions on which level of supervision a trainee requires to perform a professional activity including several FOCs. How the different FOCs as perceived by clinician raters contribute to entrustment decisions is yet unclear.

Validation of a competence-based assessment of medical students' performance in the physician's role.

Background: Assessing competence of advanced undergraduate medical students based on performance in the clinical context is the ultimate, yet challenging goal for medical educators to provide constructive alignment between undergraduate medical training and professional work of physicians. Therefore, we designed and validated a performance-based 360-degree assessment for competences of advanced undergraduate medical students.

Methods: This study was conducted in three steps: 1) Ten facets of competence considered to be most important for beginning residents were determined by a ranking study with 102 internists and 100 surgeons.

Implementing a logbook on entrustable professional activities in the final year of undergraduate medical education in Germany - a multicentric pilot study.

The final year of undergraduate medical education (practical year) should foster the transition from undergraduate medical education to graduate medical education. Medical students in the practical year should be able to assume professional tasks, and supervisors should assign these tasks to them. In this pilot study, a curriculum based on the concept of entrustable professional activities (EPAs) was implemented and evaluated in the disciplines of internal medicine, surgery and general practice at four university hospitals.

Competencies for first year residents - physicians' views from medical schools with different undergraduate curricula.

Background: Frameworks like the CanMEDS model depicting professional roles and specific professional activities provide guidelines for postgraduate education. When medical graduates start their residency, they should possess certain competencies related to communication, management and professionalism while other competencies will be refined during postgraduate training. Our study aimed to evaluate the relevance of different competencies for a first year resident required for entrustment decision from the perspective of physicians from medical faculties with different undergraduate medical curricula.