Many senior doctors have had little in the way of formal ethics training, but express considerable interest in extending their education in this area. This paper is the report of an initiative in continuing medical education in which doctors were introduced to narrative ethics. We review the theoretical basis of narrative ethics, and the structure of and response to the two-day workshop.

This paper shows that policy reforms in Vocational Education and Training in Australia since the late 1980s developed with the specific intention of reforming the official pedagogic discourse and associated pedagogic spaces that existed at that time. The discourses of flexible delivery, flexible learning, online learning, e-learning and blended learning established pedagogic spaces that are des...

The following study has been conducted to discover the characteristics of an effective clinical teacher as described by faculty and students in a selected baccalaureate school of nursing. Through determination of these characteristics, clinical teachers can improve their teaching methodology and provide a more effective learning environment for the learner. The identification of these character...

Van der Vleuten and Heeneman have added another important piece to the emerging jigsaw that will eventually show us the full picture of cost in healthcare professional education [1]. Their idea of redistributing the resources of assessment in a curriculum is an attractive one. Their suggestion that we concentrate more on progress testing could make a real difference in how we allocate funding t...

There was a request recently to categorise aspects of postgraduate medical education as either "academic" or "vocational." This raises a question about the meaning of words and about the logic behind such a distinction. In common parlance "academic" means impracticable and irrelevant to the real business of living. A "vocation" was once a calling to the higher rungs of a profession but now "voc...

BACKGROUND Continuing education (CE) is an essential professional activity. In the last decade, CE has been actively pursued by the medical profession in Australia and abroad. However, the uptake of CE in dentistry has been much slower and there is minimal Australian data on dental CE. METHODS To determine the level of CE activity, in 1998, postal questionnaires were sent to all fellows of th...

Public Health Education and Promotion, a new section of the journal Frontiers in Public Health, provides a refreshing forum for those readers who have traversed the familiar landscape of near-intractable health inequities on a national and global level and desire new knowledge on how best to ameliorate health inequities and the social factors that perpetuate them. The new “frontier” in public h...

to Rolf, for teaching me the art of doubting and the science of searching for the answers. To Tuuli, who left us early, but will always live in my heart.

In the past decade, there has been an enormous growth of distance education courses and programs in higher education. The growth of distance education is particularly evident in the field of health education. However, the enormous potential of distance education is tempered by one overriding question: How does one ensure that distance education coursework and degrees are of high quality? To thi...