A ctive learning is increasingly used as a teaching method in modern medical curricula. Therefore I have adopted case-based group discussions as an educational method for nephrology bedside teaching. In these sessions the students had first to review the patient’s history from the case record and summarise the important and vital points. This was followed by a group discussion focusing on the m...

BACKGROUND The death of a simulated patient is controversial. Some educators feel that having a manikin die is prejudicial to learning; others feel it is a way of better preparing students for these situations. Perceived self-efficacy (PSE) reflects a person's perception of their ability to carry out a task. A high PSE is necessary to manage a task efficiently. In this study, we measured the im...

Some scholars argue that simply using an educational game does not ensure that learners can generate the kinds of understandings that educators might desire. In order to maintain students’ interest in playing the game and, at the same time, helps them to learn, some scholars argue that reflection and debriefing during playing was the most effective approach. In this paper, we discuss the “Recor...

The authors present a four-step model of debriefing as formative assessment that blends evidence and theory from education research, the social and cognitive sciences, experience drawn from conducting over 3,000 debriefings, and teaching debriefing to approximately 1,000 clinicians worldwide. The steps are to: 1) note salient performance gaps related to predetermined objectives, 2) provide feed...

Introduction In May 2010, The Helsinki Declaration for Patient Safety in Anaesthesiology was launched by the two major anaesthetic societies in Europe. The ICU environment is especially unforgiving for mistakes due to the multidisciplinary, time-critical nature of care and vulnerability of the patients. Human factors account for the majority of adverse events and a sound safety climate is there...

Avoiding the problems inherent in retrospective assessment of pre-disaster health, Dirkzwager et al (pp. 144–149) found that pre-existing psychological problems were predictive of both self-report and general practitioner-recorded health problems (both psychological and physical) among survivors of a major explosion at a fireworks depot in The Netherlands. They also found poor post-disaster out...

In 1999, 69 people survived a maritime disaster on the Norwegian coast, during which 16 others died. Besides immediate psychosocial assistance, post-disaster intervention included psychological debriefings after one week, follow-up debriefing a month later, screening of those in need of individual help, and help for those returning to the scene of the disaster. The results of the psychometric t...