The impact on medical practice of commitments to change following CME lectures: a randomized controlled trial.

Background: Self-reported commitment to change (CTC) could be a potentially valuable method to address the need for continuing medical education (CME) to demonstrate clinical outcomes.

Aim: This study determines: (1) are clinicians who make CTCs more likely to report changes in their medical practices and (2) do these changes persist over time?

Methods: Intervention participants (N = 80) selected up to three commitments from a predefined list following the lecture, while control participants (N = 64) generated up to three commitments at 7 days post-lecture. At 7 and 30 days post-lecture, participants were queried if any practice change occurred as a result of attending the lecture.

Transforming the culture of surgical education: promoting teacher identity through human factors training.

Context: Promoting a culture of teaching may encourage students to choose a surgical career. Teaching in a human factors (HF) curriculum, the nontechnical skills of surgery, is associated with surgeons' stronger identity as teachers and with clinical students' improved perception of surgery and satisfaction with the clerkship experience.

Objective: To describe the effects of an HF curriculum on teaching culture in surgery.

The video-based test of communication skills: description, development, and preliminary findings.

Background: The importance of assessing physician-patient communication skills is widely recognized, but assessment methods are limited. Objective structured clinical examinations are time-consuming and resource intensive. For practicing physicians, patient surveys may be useful, but these also require substantial resources.

The Family Medicine Curriculum Resource Project: implications for faculty development.

Faculty development implications related to implementing the Family Medicine Curriculum Resource (FMCR) Project provide an opportunity to look at the recommendations of the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine's federally funded Faculty Futures Initiative (FFI) and the recent Future of Family Medicine (FFM) project. Implications for faculty development include the importance of the clerkship setting, originally defined in 1991, with new features added in today's practice environment as outlined by the FFM and the changing assumptions in approaching faculty development. Previously, faculty development focused on teaching learners to master current knowledge.

Factors influencing preceptors' responses to medical errors: a factorial survey.

Background: Preceptors must respond to trainees' medical errors, but little is known about what factors influence their responses.

Method: A total of 115 primary care preceptors from 16 medical schools responded to two medical error vignettes involving a trainee. Nine trainee-related factors were randomly varied.

Teaching and medical errors: primary care preceptors' views.

Purpose: To assess primary care preceptors' perceptions of the issues involved in teaching when medical errors occur. In particular, we examined preceptors' responses to trainees involved in medical errors, factors influencing their response, and their perceptions of barriers to teaching from medical errors.

Methods: A total of 38 primary care preceptors participated in 7 focus groups on teaching and medical errors.

The relationship between checklist scores on a communication OSCE and analogue patients' perceptions of communication.

Many efforts to teach and evaluate physician-patient communication are based on two assumptions: first, that communication can be conceptualized as consisting of specific observable behaviors, and second, that physicians who exhibit certain behaviors are more effective in communicating with patients. These assumptions are usually implicit, and are seldom tested. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether specific communication behaviors are positively related to patients' perceptions of effective communication.

Primary care renewal: regional faculty development and organizational change.

Background: Many reports, including the Future of Family Medicine, have called for change in primary care, but few have defined, implemented, and evaluated mechanisms to address such change. The regional, interdisciplinary Primary Care Renewal Project was designed to address problems in primary care practice and teaching related to practice management, compensation, increasing responsibility for teaching, and faculty development.

Methods: Twelve northeastern US medical schools assembled a conference attended by teams of key stakeholders representing both clinical and educational missions.