Clinical placements are integral to health professional preparatory courses. These placements allow for the application of classroom-based learning into real patient care situations. In doing so, they provide opportunities for applying theoretical knowledge into practice contexts, skills development and socialisation into the chosen profession.…

This longitudinal study examines changes in understanding of dental practice among a cohort of students in the early years of a dentistry programme. In their first two professional years, we identified five distinct understandings of dental practice that we have ordered from least to most comprehensive: "relieving pain or generally caring for…

Problem statement and background: Feedback is essential to learning and practice improvement, yet challenging both to provide and receive. The purpose of this paper was to explore reflective processes which physicians described as they considered their assessment feedback and the perceived utility of that reflective process. Methods: This is a…

Script concordance test (SCT) is a case based assessment format of clinical reasoning in which questions are nested into several cases. Recent results using Q4 format suggest that nested questions contribute more to reliability of measure than cases. The present study aims at documenting variance components associated with SCT cases and nested…

No previous studies have described how faculty give summative evaluations to learners on the medical wards. The aim of this study was to describe summative evaluations on the medical wards. Participants were students, house staff and faculty at the University of Pittsburgh. Ward rotation evaluative sessions were tape recorded. Feedback was…

Learning to counsel patients in a teaching clinic or hospital occurs in the presence of the competing agendas of patient care and student education. We wondered about the challenges that these tensions create for clinical novices learning to deliver bad news to patients. In this preliminary study, we audio-taped and transcribed the interviews of…

More than 500,000 flexible bronchoscopies are performed annually by chest physicians in the United States (Ernst et al., Chest 123:1693-1717, 2003). Indications include diagnosis of lung cancer and airway tumors, benign strictures, pulmonary infections, and treatment of central airway obstruction, emphysema, and intraepithelial lesions such as…

The goal of this study was to increase our understanding of the learning-oriented verbal interactions taking place between students during the problem-based learning (PBL) cycle. The verbal interactions of one PBL group of five students throughout an entire PBL cycle were recorded in this data-intensive case study. The verbatim transcript…

The academic success of students is a priority for all universities. This study identifies factors associated with first year academic success (performance and retention) that can be used to improve the quality of the student learning experience. A retrospective cohort study was conducted with a census of all 381 full time students enrolled in the…

Clinical education is an important component of undergraduate nurse education, in which clinical teachers facilitate students' application of theoretical classroom knowledge into the clinical practice setting. Mothering as part of clinical teachers' work was a major finding from a larger study exploring clinical teaching work to identify what…

Simulation-based teaching (SBT) is increasingly used in medical education. As an alternative to other teaching methods there is a lack of evidence concerning its efficacy. The aim of this study was to evaluate the potency of SBT in anesthesia in comparison to problem-based discussion (PBD) with students in a randomized controlled setting.…

There has been a proliferation of taught masters' degrees for nurses in recent years, and like masters' programmes in other disciplines, the aspirations of such educational endeavours are far from unanimous. This article reports on part of a wider study, and focuses on a qualitative analysis of the perspectives of two key sets of stakeholders,…

To investigate the reliability and feasibility of six potential workplace-based assessment methods in general practice training: criterion audit, multi-source feedback from clinical and non-clinical colleagues, patient feedback (the CARE Measure), referral letters, significant event analysis, and video analysis of consultations. Performance of GP…

In many parts of the world the practice of medicine and medical education increasingly focus on providing patient care within context of the larger healthcare system. Our purpose is to solicit perceptions of all professional stakeholders (e.g. nurses) of the system regarding the U.S. ACGME competency Systems Based Practice to uncover the extent to…

It is known that interaction between pharmaceutical companies and medical professionals may lead to corruption of professional values, irrational use of medicine, and negative effects on the patient-physician relationship. Medical students frequently interact with pharmaceutical company representatives and increasingly accept their gifts.…