Beyond Measure: Teaching Clinical Skills

Beyond measure: teaching clinical skills.

I recently visited a retired physician who practiced in Roma, Texas, population 10000. His family has lived and ranched in Roma for 6 generations, well before the border was moved and Roma became part of the United States. As the town's first and only physician for most of his 4-plus decades in practice, Dr Mario Ramirez did it all: deliveries, house calls, minor surgery, and seeing 60 people a...

Teaching communication skills: beyond wishful thinking.

Communication skills tend to decline with time unless they are regularly recalled and practiced. However, most medical schools still deliver clinical communication training only during pre-clinical years although the clinical environment is considered to be ideal for acquiring and teaching clinical communication. The aim of this article is to review the barriers that prevent communication skill...

Teaching clinical skills with patient resources.

Teaching and Assessing Clinical Reasoning Skills.

Clinical reasoning is a core competency expected to be acquired by all clinicians. It is the ability to integrate and apply different types of knowledge, weigh evidence critically and reflect upon the process used to arrive at a diagnosis. Problems with clinical reasoning often occur because of inadequate knowledge, flaws in data gathering and improper approach to information processing. Some o...

Beyond the happy sheets! Evaluating learning in information skills teaching

This paper reviews three years of data measuring students' immediate reactions to a computer-assisted learning package in information skills and reports on work in progress to establish a more comprehensive programme of evaluation which will assess the medium term impact on learning of both the courseware itself and the way the courseware is delivered to students. The GAELS courseware was devel...