Residents' perceptions of the ideal clinical teacher--a qualitative study.

Objective: The object of this study was to establish what residents in 1994 and 2003 characterised as an ideal clinical teacher and whether differences existed between residents' views in 1994 and 2003.

Setting: postgraduate medical education in the Netherlands.

Subjects: 207 obstetric-gynaecologic residents.

The impact of clerkships on students' specialty preferences: what do undergraduates learn for their profession?

Objective: Clinical experiences and gender have been shown to influence medical students' specialty choices. It remains unclear, however, which aspects of experiences make students favour some specialties and reject others. This study aimed to clarify the effects of clerkships on specialty choice and to identify explanatory factors.

Clinical skills training in a skills lab compared with skills training in internships: comparison of skills development curricula.

Context: The necessity of learning skills through "integrated skills training" at an undergraduate level has been supported by several studies. The University of Antwerp implemented undergraduate skills training in its renewed curriculum in 1998, after it was demonstrated that Flemish students did not master their medical skills as well as Dutch students who received "integrated skills training" as part of their undergraduate medical course.

Aim: The aim of this study was to compare the skill outcome levels of two different student populations: students who had been trained in basic clinical skills mainly through clinical internships in year 7 with students who had learned these skills through an integrated longitudinal programme in a special learning environment in years 1-5 prior to their internship experience.

How interdisciplinary teams can create multi-disciplinary education: the interplay between team processes and educational quality.

Context: Many undergraduate medical education programmes offer integrated multi-disciplinary courses, which are generally developed by a team of teachers from different disciplines. Research has shown that multi-disciplinary teams may encounter problems, which can be detrimental to productive co-operation, which in turn may diminish educational quality. Because we expected that charting these problems might yield suggestions for addressing them, we examined the relationships between team diversity, team processes and course quality.

Attending doctors' perspectives on how residents learn.

Context: Graduate medical education is currently facing major educational reforms. There is a lack of empirical evidence in the literature about the learning processes of residents in the clinical workplace. This qualitative study uses a 'grounded theory' approach to continue the development of a theoretical framework of learning in the clinical workplace by adding the perspective of attending doctors.

The influence of context on residents' evaluations: effects of priming on clinical judgment and affect.

Different lines of research have suggested that context is important in acting and learning in the clinical workplace. It is not clear how contextual information influences residents' constructions of the situations in which they participate. The category accessibility paradigm from social psychology appears to offer an interesting perspective for studying this topic.

What is the role of the consultant responsible for postgraduate education in the clinical department?

Background: The organisation of specialist training is complex and involves many clinical departments. The position of consultants responsible for education (CRE) in specialist training at department level is poorly defined in the literature.

Aims: The aim of the study was to explore expectations of stakeholders concerning the role and position of a CRE in specialist training.

Identification of best evidence in medical education. Case study.

Aim: Compare how different researchers performed in screening for informative evidence about medical education.

Method: Six researchers with three different levels of involvement in a systematic literature review screened articles by title and (where available) abstract, and then by reading articles they had selected in full text. The reference standard was a consensus decision to include or exclude the article in the final analysis, whose results are published elsewhere.

Assessing students' research reports: development of a rating scale.

Background: There is a lack of explicit criteria for the assessment of students' research reports. Teachers tend to use their own, idiosyncratic sets of implicit criteria. A well-defined set of criteria could foster reliable and valid assessment of students' research reports.

Students' perceptions of early patient encounters in a PBL curriculum: a first evaluation of the Maastricht experience.

Introduction: Real patient encounters before the clinical phase of undergraduate medical education are recommended to stimulate integration of theory and practice. Such encounters are not easy to integrate into the three phases of the problem-based learning cycle, i.e.

How residents learn: qualitative evidence for the pivotal role of clinical activities.

Objectives: Medical councils worldwide have outlined new standards for postgraduate medical education. This means that residency programmes will have to integrate modern educational views into the clinical workplace. Postgraduate medical education is often characterised as a process of learning from experience.

Gender shift in realisation of preferred type of GP practice: longitudinal survey over the last 25 years.

Background: An increasing number of newly trained Dutch GPs prefer to work in a group practice and as a non-principal rather than in a single-handed practice. In view of the greater number of female doctors, changing practice preferences, and discussions on future workforce problems, the question is whether male and female GPs were able to realise their initial preferences in the past and will be able to do so in the future.

Methods: We have conducted longitudinal cohort study of all GPs in the Netherlands seeking a practice between 1980 and 2004.

Students' opinions about the effects of preclinical patient contacts on their learning.

Several reasons have been given why students should have contacts with real patients early in the undergraduate medical curriculum, i.e., in the preclinical phase.

[Are some of the challenging aspects of CanMEDS roles valid in a non-Canadian setting? Secondary publication].

A questionnaire survey among 8749 Danish physicians about how the CanMEDS roles apply in an international context. Response rate 42.8% (3,476).

Psychometric properties of an instrument to measure the clinical learning environment.

Objectives: The clinical learning environment is an influential factor in work-based learning. Evaluation of this environment gives insight into the educational functioning of clinical departments. The Postgraduate Hospital Educational Environment Measure (PHEEM) is an evaluation tool consisting of a validated questionnaire with 3 subscales.

Experience-based learning: a model linking the processes and outcomes of medical students' workplace learning.

Objective: To develop a model linking the processes and outcomes of workplace learning.

Methods: We synthesised a model from grounded theory analysis of group discussions before and after experimental strengthening of medical students' workplace learning. The research was conducted within a problem-based clinical curriculum with little early workplace experience, involving 24 junior and 12 senior medical students.

A Description of a Validated Effective Teacher-Training Workshop for Medical Residents.

Unlabelled: A teacher-training program for residents was designed and piloted in the St. Elisabeth Hospital in Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles. The program comprised of six modules namely: effective teaching, self-knowledge and teaching ability, feedback, assessing prior knowledge, trouble shooting and time management.

Design of integrated practice for learning professional competences.

To acquire professional competences that entail performance of complex skills, an authentic learning environment is required focused on the integration of all aspects of competences. However, most educational programmes offer separate building blocks, such as separate modules for knowledge and skills. Students accumulate what they have learned in these modules as they progress through the curriculum.

Are some of the challenging aspects of the CanMEDS roles valid outside Canada?

Context: Many countries have adopted the CanMEDS roles. However, there is limited information on how these apply in an international context and in different specialties.

Objectives: To survey trainee and specialist ratings of the importance of the CanMEDS roles and perceived ability to perform tasks within the roles.

Chronic patients in undergraduate education: didactic value as perceived by students.

Objectives: Medical education should prepare students for future clinical practice. However, this preparation is inadequate for the most prevalent problem in health care: chronic disease. This applies to the continuous aspect of chronic disease.

Student evaluation of the clinical 'curriculum in action'.

Aim: To examine how students' evaluations of the environment, process and outcome of clinical learning interrelated and correlated with assessment results.

Method: A post hoc study in the 3rd of 5 years in a student-centred, horizontally integrated, objective-based medical curriculum. In the last week of each module, students evaluated what they had learned and how they had learned it using a previously validated, web-based scale.

The learning processes of international students through the eyes of foreign supervisors.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with external supervisors of international electives undertaken by Dutch undergraduate students, in order to gain insight into student learning processes during these electives. The interviews served to triangulate information on these learning processes that was obtained from students' self-reports. The results of the case study reported in this paper were largely consistent with findings from prior studies of international electives in which learning processes and sociocultural differences were examined: experiential learning processes appeared to dominate and sociocultural differences occasionally seemed to blur productive learning, especially when the differences between the national cultures of host country and student home country were substantial.

A two-day teacher-training programme for medical residents: investigating the impact on teaching ability.

Introduction: Many of the residents who supervise medical students in clinical practice are unfamiliar with the principles of effective supervision. Training in teaching skills is therefore seen as an effective strategy to improve the quality of clinical supervision.

Method: Twenty seven medical residents were matched and assigned to an experimental group (n = 14) and a control group (n = 13).

Internationalization of medical education in the Netherlands: state of affairs.

In the framework of the Bologna Process, internationalization co-ordinators of seven (out of eight) Dutch medical schools completed an electronic survey about internationalization-related aspects of the curriculum. Common features of internationalization in Dutch medical schools were: the numbers of outgoing students exceeded the numbers of incoming students, and most international programmes involved clinical training and research projects. We recommend that Dutch medical schools should pay more attention to 'Internationalization at Home' and focus on conditions that are conducive to participation by foreign students.