A Cardiovascular Teaching Laboratory: the master class in ambulatory teaching.

For decades, outpatient teaching has been equated with the outpatient clinic or facility, with brief, discontinuous patient encounters in a variety of settings. In spite of diverse suggested remedies, the result has been a difficult environment for learning and teaching. In addition, medical students possess limited clinical information at the time of their initial physical diagnosis experience. Reinforcement of the basic tenets of the medical history and the physical examination is frequently inconsistent during the clinical years. Senior medical students, medical house officers, or fellows in training have a continuing need for integration of advanced physical diagnostic techniques in their clinical experiences. We developed the Cardiovascular Teaching Laboratory (CVTL) in order to address these concerns. The patient and the Student of Medicine (SOM) come together in a patient-oriented, clinical diagnostic laboratory environment dedicated to A Cardiovascular Teaching Laboratory: The Master Class in Ambulatory Teaching CHARLES F. WOOLEY, ELIZABETH A. SPARKS, SHARON OLSEN, HARISIOS BOUDOULAS Division of Cardiology, Department of Internal Medicine, College of Medicine and Public Health, The Ohio State University, Columbus Ohio, USA; Biomedical Research Foundation, Academy of Athens, Greece