Practical clinical skills assessment for a cohort of 680 2nd year human medicine students. Is it feasible?

In clinical skills training objective structured clinical examinations (OSCEs) are the method of choice to foster learning. Hence, implementing them is challenging and expensive. Thus it is investigated how an alternative procedure that keeps OSCE's essential elements, but assigns less stations to each student, works in terms of validity and justifiability.

Twelve tips for designing and implementing a structured rater training in OSCEs.

Background: Observation, rating, and grading are parts of the routine of the faculty when in contact with medical students. Most interestingly, there is a dearth of proper instructions on rater training for objective structured clinical examinations (OSCEs) in medical education literature.

Aims: We assembled 12 tips for implementing a structured rater training program.

A consensus statement on practical skills in medical school - a position paper by the GMA Committee on Practical Skills.

Introduction: Encouraged by the change in licensing regulations the practical professional skills in Germany received a higher priority and are taught in medical schools therefore increasingly. This created the need to standardize the process more and more. On the initiative of the German skills labs the German Medical Association Committee for practical skills was established and developed a competency-based catalogue of learning objectives, whose origin and structure is described here.

Venous air embolism through central venous access.

An 25-year-old man was buried by an avalanche during off-slope skiing. He was rescued by his companions and resuscitated by mouth-to-mouth ventilation. The emergency physician from a helicopter based emergency medical service placed two venous lines in both external jugular veins and secured the airway with a tracheal tube.

The potential of venous air embolism ascending retrograde to the brain.

A bench study was performed to investigate the potential of air bubbles entering a central vein via a central venous catheter to ascend retrograde to the brain. The results support the hypothesis that air bubbles may rise retrograde against the venous blood flow, depending on bubble size, central vein diameter and cardiac output. A review of radiological findings in published case reports indicates that the occurrence of retrograde cerebral air embolism is underestimated.