BACKGROUND Since 2007 a portfolio of learning has become a requirement for assessment of postgraduate family medicine training by the Colleges of Medicine of South Africa. A uniform portfolio of learning has been developed and content validity established among the eight postgraduate programmes. The aim of this study was to investigate the portfolio's acceptability, educational impact, and perc...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES The need for change in medical curricula is increasing, due partially to tougher curriculum and evaluation standards. Participants in our academic medicine fellowship learn to develop curricula, but not all are successful at fully implementing them. This study looked for facilitators of and barriers to curriculum implementation by individual fellows. A literature revie...

BACKGROUND In resource limited settings, many People Living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) lack access to sufficient quantities of nutritious foods, which poses additional challenges to the success of antiretroviral therapy (ART). Maintaining adequate food consumption and nutrient intake levels and meeting the special nutritional needs to cope up with the disease and the ART are critical for PLWHA to ac...

BACKGROUND Medical schools are improving end-of-life (EOL) care curricula; however, students rarely practice EOL communication skills in a safe learning environment. OBJECTIVE Our objective was to study which curriculum improves students' ability to discuss hospice care. METHODS We conducted a study of six family medicine clerkship blocks; three taught with a didactic curriculum (A) and thr...

BACKGROUND While previous authors have emphasized the importance of integrating and reinforcing evidence-based medicine (EBM) skills in residency, there are few published examples of such curricula. We designed an EBM curriculum to train family practice interns in essential EBM skills for information mastery using clinical questions generated by the family practice inpatient service. We sought ...

Identifying the curricular need for medical students and family medicine residents is a continuing challenge. As educators, we face similar challenges of providing a comprehensive and broad curriculum in medical schools as well as in family medicine residency programs. Post-residency success is then often measured by evaluating board certiŽ cation rates which rely upon individual speciality boa...

INTRODUCTION In the last decade of the 20th century, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) have experienced rapid changes in health policies. This process was largely supported by international grants. After this support has ended, it is important to keep up with the development, developing its own strategies and priorities. Aims and methods. The aim of the paper is to make a propos...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Future physicians are urged to balance effectiveness and cost in their prescribing of medications. This study determined whether educational sessions for residents together with a "Resident Report Card" changed residents' prescribing of generic medications in both commercial and Medicaid patient panels, compared with regional performance of physicians in practice in th...