Flu Symptoms and Diagnosis: Learn the common symptoms of the flu and how it can be diagnosed.
an innovative curriculum on influenza created by former medical student Kelsey Hills-Evans, MD, now an internal medicine resident at Harvard. Her online videos, such as the one above (which is the first in the series), are accessible not only to Flu Crew’s student participants but the public at large.
The videos are all under 5 minutes. You can read an email interview with the creator Hills Evans at Stanford Medicine Scope
they put together some really amazing videos from Functional Medicine Associates doctors explaining everything from the basics of influenza to common misconceptions and fears that people have about the flu vaccine. They deserve all of the credit for the idea and execution of the project.
For over a decade Carol Dweck and her team studied the effects of praise on students. This study involved a series of experiments on over 400 5th graders from all over the country.
The results will blow your mind.
For the theory behind all this watch this TED talk: https://youtu.be/_X0mgOOSpLU
We recently tested twitter as a way of interaction with medical students. Our number of students attending lectures have outgrown the number of places in one lecture room. Since years we us two lecture rooms, one with a video link so students can follow the lecture on screen. For this second lecture room but also for those attending the life lecture we introduced twitter as a way to pose questions. We introduced the twitter account at the start of the semester, via emails and at the lectures. We paused half way of the lecture to read the tweets from the computer screen and at the end of the lecture.
The interaction was disappointing. Students don’t need or want twitter for interaction.
In this publication the tips start with explanation of twitter and encouragement to start a twitter account as medical educator.
Set up a Twitter account for a specific class or group,set ground rules for use and promote guidelines for professional behaviour
The third tip above is a very good one. In the first lecture we had to warn some students who were posing irrelevant question. After some strong words these interfering tweets disappeared.Their next tip is to display live Twitter chat during lectures. We didn’t do this, we figured it would distract the students from the ongoing lecture.
Use Twitter as a platform to convey credible information sources to students
Most students use online information. Most of this information is hard to evaluate. Twitter can be used to credible information or information sources to students.
The next tip is to use Twitter to create a ‘real life’ context for students. Links to current media stories that relate to course content may allow students to contextualize course information and improve their learning motivation. Next tip is start a twibe. A twibe is a twitter group. A twibe can give students the opportunity to communicate outside of class. This could stimulate informal learning. Tip 8 is to use twitter for course feedback.
This format for course evaluations may have advantages over traditional methods. Students may feel more anonymity without feeling disconnected from the feedback they are giving.
Another suggestion is to use twitter for informal quizzes and polls.This offers options for informal quizzing and polls when compared to a show of hands. Questions can be projected on a screen, and students can Tweet their answers.Because Tweets can be anonymous, more students are likely to submit answers.
Obviously as also suggested by the authors, the use of twitter in (medical) education should be explored further, most preferably in research.
Forgie SE, Duff JP, & Ross S (2013). Twelve tips for using Twitter as a learning tool in medical education. Medical teacher, 35 (1), 8-14 PMID: 23259608
DJ Cavem, as this story on HuffPost Parents explains, started writing and sharing his educational songs in Denver schools as a clever way to help kids beat back diet-related health issues, such as obesity and diabetes.
This video will certainly appeal to the youngsters
For medical students the transition to clerkship can be a “shock of practice”. They usually have to get around in a field very strange to them, due to the stress they almost forget everything they have learned the previous 3-4 years. Thanks to Annemarie Cunningham I came across a third year med students blog.
This post will highlight a few of my trepidations; in a follow up post I will share some of the advice for clerkship that I have received from a variety of sources. If you have anything you think I should include please pass it along
Found this excellent video on CasesBlog, with advice for doctors and reactions on twitter.
CEO Toby Cosgrove, MD, shared this video, titled “Empathy,” with the Cleveland Clinic staff during his 2013 State of the Clinic address on Feb. 27, 2013. The video relates to any person – not only patients and physicians. It’s so worth it 4 minutes of your time
This video shows excellent use of evernote and IdeaPaint for interactive learning but why should it be kept for high school, could think of a few examples to use it in medical education, can you? Let me know in the comments.
When you combine IdeaPaint’s ability turn any wall or surface into a canvas and Evernote’s ability to capture, archive and make that surface searchable, the possibilities for turning any room into an interactive environment are endless. These two products come together in a particularly exciting way in a classroom environment, which can become a more creative and engaging place to learn.
Our health care system today has an adverse event rate approximately equal to that of driving an automobile putting patients at a significant risk
The trouble as stated in this excellent editorial in Academic Medicine is the culture in which most health care professional work. Unfortunately working in a health care setting is mostly not about preventing errors or finding solutions to errors as in other sorts of organizations such as with airliner pilots or the military. In those organizations errors are part of their work. They are all expected to be part of the solution to errors than part of the problem. We in health care should also be a part of the solution and put all efforts to achieve succes in fighting against and preventing errors.
Medical education should be the place to start with teaching about the subjects of patient safety.
Research about patient safety is mostly done on procedures such as placing bloodstream catheters in Intensive Care Units. Simulation-based training reduces medical error, enhances clinical outcomes, and reduces the cost of clinical care. Examples in medicine for simulation based training are: laparoscopic surgery, anesthesiology with wireless machines that can blink, breathe, and simulate a plethora of medical illnesses.
It is absolutely the time for physicians, hospital managers, policy makers, patients, and the public alike to demand resources for the development of simulation centers that house modern equipment, with expert faculty to train the physicians of today. These processes must be integrated into the structure of current medical curricula, in order to achieve the highest possible outcomes for our patients.
More applications are on their way with progressing technical possibilities. There’s even a website for the Advanced Initiatives in Medical Simulation. It’s a lobbying coalition of individuals, organizations, and companies who wish to promote medical simulation in order to enhance patient safety, with concomitant error and cost reduction.
Health professions education efforts must require critical safety-related competencies and assess students’ safety knowledge, skills, and behaviors with as much fervor as their knowledge of the Krebs cycle and their ability to determine the differential diagnosis of weight loss.
These elemaents should be in the formal curricula. Every team member should be responsible for patient safety and hierarchie should be leveled. What do you think?
Wagner, D., Noel, M., Barry, H., & Reznich, C. (2011). Safe Expectations Academic Medicine, 86 (11) DOI: 10.1097/ACM.0b013e3182327c81
Aggarwal, R., & Darzi, A. (2011). Simulation to Enhance Patient Safety: Why Aren’t We There Yet? Chest, 140 (4), 854-858 DOI: 10.1378/chest.11-0728
Teaching patient safety starts in medical school. Hospitals can be weired chaotic places. It’s often a wonder everything keeps working as it should although failures do occur. Medical professionals come to realize that mistakes happen and they adapt their working procedures to those of the so called high reliability organizations such as aircrafts, airline pilots, forest firefighting teams and trauma centers.
This change in mostly culture doesn’t go swiftly mostly with the excuse that their work is different from those organizations mentioned. Their work is incomparable to other organization which is not true, moreover some principles can easily be adapted to also work in health organizations such as hospitals.
Much work has to be done, but starting teaching about patient safety during medical education surely increases patient safety in the future.
Principles from high reliability organizations are:
Preoccupation with failures. Not only the big ones but also the small ones. These are often ignored and disregarded as variance.
Consider the following: stretchers used for patient transport can occasionally have stuck wheels. Initially, this does not really affect the department as a whole because there are many stretchers. But if not addressed, the lack of stretchers over time can paralyze a department at the worst possible moment.
Near misses are of much importance and response to these near failures often account for the culture of quality
Reluctance to oversimplify. Oversimplifying e.g. an X ray request with the drop down menu “Chest pain” can lead to clinical problems.
With each cause of chest pain, there are different associations and recommendations that need to be made. Yet unless additional clinical points are also added to the requisition, the radiologist cannot render a more directed opinion.
Sensitivity to operation. Being aware of what is written down in standard operating procedures and what is done in real life can be two very different things. Organizations should always look for these differences, not only be aware of them.
Commitment to Resilience. Once a failure has happened, containing and limiting damage is required, and learning from mistakes is essential.
Deference to Local Expertise.
In medicine, junior clinical or support staff members are frequently not comfortable voicing
their concerns about situations or may be ignored by more senior staff members. Understanding these dynamics and talking about roles in advance may reduce power distance and improve quality of care.
Prasanna, P., & Nagy, P. (2011). Learning From High-Reliability Organizations Journal of the American College of Radiology, 8 (10), 725-726 DOI: 10.1016/j.jacr.2011.06.020