Thinking outside the box

Health care education is developing at a high pace, all around the world. New ideas are needed, new ideas that work and help us meet the goals we set for improving health care education. PME wants to contribute to seeing with new eyes by offering its readers articles that are inspirational by nature. Articles with new ideas or with research based on new ideas that work. This inspiration combined with strong research is what PME is all about. The author of the first original article of this issue, Sonya Miller, offers us a curriculum focused on informed empathy [2]. As 20 % of the US population is disabled, health care providers are challenged by the demands of disabled patients. They want to be treated as equals, but say that they are often treated unequally. In order to train health care workers’ empathy, a new curriculum was created. The developers thought out of the box in designing this curriculum: as well as involving real (disabled) patients, they also stimulated their students in providing artistic interpretation (poems, photos,...) to effectively develop and enhance informed empathy. In this article, the author presents a new idea that works, underlining this by stating ‘health is influenced by more than a diagnosis, disability, medical professional or hospital’. In the second original article, Dijksterhuis et al. [3] present the questionnaire they developed which contains questions on the progress test that is used in postgraduate obstetrics and gynaecology in the Netherlands. They asked both educational supervisors and trainees to reflect on acceptability and educational impact. All trainees have to take the test at regular intervals, but failing the test does not have any consequences for the trainees progress.