ASH Medical Educators Institute: A View From the Classroom

A healthy lifestyle is fundamental for the prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease and other noncommunicable diseases (NCDs). Investment in primary prevention, including modification of health risk behaviors, could result in a 4-fold improvement in health outcomes compared with secondary prevention based on pharmacological treatment. The American Heart Association (AHA) emphasized the importance of lifestyle in its 2020 goals for cardiovascular health promotion and disease reduction. In addition to defining “cardiovascular health” based on criteria for blood pressure and biochemical markers (lipids and glycemia), the AHA Strategic Planning Committee further identified lifestyle characteristics of central importance: nutrition, physical activity, smoking, and maintenance of a healthy body weight.1 The World Health Organization estimated that ≈80% of NCDs could be prevented if 4 key lifestyle practices were followed: a healthy diet, being physically active, avoidance of tobacco, and alcohol intake in moderation.2 To support healthy lifestyle initiatives, major changes are necessary at the societal level to improve population health. Numerous strategies might help to create a culture that promotes and facilitates healthy behaviors, including creating laws and regulations, mounting large-scale public awareness and education campaigns, implementing local community programs, and providing individual counseling.3 Physicians are uniquely positioned to encourage individuals to adopt healthy lifestyle behaviors: Approximately 80% of Americans visit their primary care physician at least once a year. Physicians directly communicate with their patients during clinical encounters across numerous settings, and research indicates that patients highly value recommendations provided by their physicians.4,5 However, data further indicate that lifestyle counseling does not routinely occur in physicians’ offices, thereby representing a lost opportunity. Physicians report that they perform lifestyle counseling during ≈34% of clinic visits.4 Patients, in turn, report an even lower frequency of physician lifestyle counseling. For example, obese patients reported receiving physical activity and …

This paper concludes five current medical education systems by investigating medical education status in both China and abroad. They are: 5+3 years British system, 6-year German system, 6-year Russian system, “4+4” years American system, and 5+3+3 years Chinese system. Based on the five systems, this paper analyzes the current situation of medical postgraduate student education of the Great Britain, Germany, U.S.A, France, and China. In the last part of this paper, a careful consideration on Chinese medical education is made. Authors of this paper suggest that China should gradually call off multi-level medical education; take 8-year, 5-year, and 5+4 years education as the principal modes of medical education. Students should be offered medical doctor’s degree and positioned as diplomates after the 8-year medical education. Students who finish the 5-year medical education will be awarded the bachelor’s degree and work as general practitioner. Students decide to receive another 4 years medical education after finishing the 5-year one will be granted medical doctor’s degree (diplomate or general practitioner). The 3-year medical postgraduate education should be gradually abolished. Key words: Medical education; Postgraduate education; Education system

Skin of color representation in medical education: An analysis of National Board of Medical Examiners' self-assessments and popular question banks

Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California.

University of Missouri—Kansas City School of Medicine

With the continuous advancement of global medical technology and the increasing demand for humanized medical services, the cultivation of medical students' comprehensive quality has become a core goal of medical education. The purpose of this study is to explore the core role and practical value of medical humanities education in the cultivation of medical students' comprehensive quality, and to provide theoretical support and practical reference for the reform of global medical education. This study adopted a mixed research method combining systematic literature review and cross-sectional survey. First, a comprehensive search was conducted in databases such as PubMed, Web of Science, and CNKI to sort out and analyze domestic and foreign literatures on medical humanities education and medical students' comprehensive quality cultivation in the past 10 years; then, a questionnaire survey was carried out among 500 medical students from 10 medical colleges and universities in different countries to investigate their cognitive level of medical humanities, the current situation of receiving humanities education, and the impact of humanities education on their professional literacy, communication ability and ethical judgment. The results showed that medical humanities education has a significant positive correlation with the improvement of medical students' comprehensive quality, which can effectively enhance their empathy ability, sense of professional responsibility, ethical decision-making ability and doctor-patient communication skills; however, there are problems such as inadequate integration of humanities education into professional training, single teaching mode and uneven teaching quality in medical education in many countries. The conclusion points out that medical humanities education is an indispensable part of medical students' comprehensive quality cultivation, and it is necessary to construct a diversified and integrated medical humanities education system integrating curriculum setting, practical teaching and cultural edification to promote the all-round development of medical students and meet the needs of modern medical practice.

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. As Artificial Intelligence (AI) develops in medicine, there is a greater awareness that medical education may also benefit from AI. Many AI projects are already underway, and many more are still to come. Most medical education administrators and educators are aware of AI, but are not necessarily familiar enough with it to understand the areas of possible application in both using AI in medical education, and also in the content areas that need to be raised with their students. As such, they are at a disadvantage of not understanding the current lie of the land, and are at an even greater disadvantage of not being able to influence and guide future AI projects. This paper attempts to provide an AI conceptual and practical framework for medical education administrators and educators, so that they may have a clearer understanding of the current situation, and may be better placed to guide future AI developments to meet their needs in medical education.

Emory University School of Medicine.

Reviewed by: Doctors in the Making: Memoirs and Medical Education Ann Jurecic (bio) Suzanne Poirier. Doctors in the Making: Memoirs and Medical Education. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2009. 200 pp. ISBN 978-1587297922, $39.95. Suzanne Poirier, author of Doctors in the Making: Memoirs and Medical Education, taught literature to medical students at the University of Illinois College of Medicine for twenty-five years, and in this new book she focuses her considerable critical and educational expertise on autobiographical writing by doctors-in-training. Bridging literary criticism and ethnography, Poirier examines over forty book-length accounts of medical education—medical school, residency, or both—written between 1965 and 2005, and mines these memoirs, diaries, and blogs for what they collectively reveal about the subjective experience of such training. More than future lawyers, teachers, or business people, future doctors undergo a notoriously long and brutal apprenticeship and, perhaps because the experience can be so inhumane, they more often choose to write about it. They turn to writing to make sense of the suffering they witness and to sort through the wrenching tests and transformations of their own identities. Poirier interprets these memoirs through both literary and social scientific lenses: they become data for her qualitative assessment of the subjective effects—especially the emotional effects—of becoming a doctor. Although Poirier respects the competence of the physicians who emerge from medical schools in the United States, she finds in this body of work evidence of how poorly the system of medical education serves the people who move through it. The primary audiences for Poirier's literary-ethnographic study are medical educators and scholars in the medical humanities. She positions her work amidst studies of medical culture and education from fields such as history, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy. With clear, jargon-free prose, she also situates it in relationship to literary studies, explaining how life stories in medicine draw on traditions of the picaresque, the bildungsroman, and the coming-of-age story, as well as the ideal of the self-reliant individual perpetuated by both the American literary tradition and medical culture. Because she is writing for an audience broader than literary studies, her discussion of theoretical issues related to autobiography is appropriately light. She quotes liberally from the books and blogs in her archive, letting the doctors' voices share space with her interpretations. And yet, she does not settle for simplistic readings of the material, and cautions her readers to be attuned to the many ways stories are mediated. Although Poirier's readers are likely to be humanists who work in the medical education system, it would be a mistake for literary scholars to assume that Doctors in the Making is not relevant to the more general study of autobiography. Poirier's book invites critics to think in new ways about [End Page 546] what personal writing accomplishes for the writer. The narratives she examines are examples of what Richard E. Miller calls "institutional autobiographies" (138). This genre, he explains in Writing at the End of the World (U of Pittsburgh P, 1995), unites "the seemingly opposed worlds of the personal—where one is unique, free, and outside of history—and the institutional—where one is constrained, anonymous, and imprisoned by the accretion of past practice" (138). Miller conceives of the institutional autobiography as intentionally connecting "the conventional questions that reside at the heart of the autobiographical enterprise" with a narrative that is located "within a specific range of institutional contexts" (138). Poirier's study demonstrates, however, that "shifting attention from the self to the nexus where self and institution meet" (Miller 138) can also be an implicit, although perhaps unrecognized, goal of memoirs in which subjective transformation intersects with professionalization. Frequently, the memoirs and journals of medical students address tensions between the goals and methods of medical education. This system values scientific knowledge and skill above all, and yet it also expects to produce physicians who are responsive and altruistic, even as it provides comparatively little instruction regarding patient care. The cognitive and emotional dissonance created by such training surfaces regularly in the memoirs Poirier examines. She quotes Perri Klass, for instance, expressing her discomfort with the person she...

Актуальность. Эксперты ВОЗ отмечают, что сегодня в Европе не существует общепризнанного подхода к непрерывному медицинскому образованию, однако существует общее мнение, что качество медицинских услуг напрямую зависит от постоянного развития и оценки профессиональных компетенций врачей в процессе их повышения квалификации. Особое внимание всегда уделялось обеспечению (и постоянному совершенствованию) академического уровня поставщиков образовательных услуг или программ, на основе которых врачи согласовывают собственные планы по получению необходимых профессиональных знаний и навыков. Важнейшей предпосылкой обеспечения повышения квалификации является создание единой системы аккредитации поставщиков образовательных услуг или программ, а также "коллективная ответственность" всех участников медицинского образования. Цель: исследовать развитие системы последипломного и непрерывного образования в Украине на примере ведущего национального учреждения последипломного образования – Национальной медицинской академии последипломного образования имени П. Л. Шупика (НМАПО). Материалы и методы. Архивные материалы. В исследовании мы использовали общий (универсальный) метод, исторический и логический методы. Результаты. Согласно определению Всемирной федерации медицинского образования (WFME), последипломное медицинское образование – это фаза медицинского образования, на которой врачи развивают свои компетенции после завершения базовой медицинской квалификации. Этот этап обучения проводится в соответствии с определенными правилами и инструкциями. Последипломное медицинское образование включает подготовку к сертификации и/или лицензирования, производственную/профессиональную подготовку, специализацию и узкую специализацию, а также другие формализованные учебные программы для развития определенных экспертных функций. Будучи частью непрерывного медицинского образования, последипломное образование включается в непрерывное медицинское образование (НМО) или непрерывное профессиональное развитие (НПР). Согласно определению WFME, НПР касается подготовки врачей, которая начинается после окончания базового и последипломного медицинского образования и продолжается в дальнейшем в течение профессиональной жизни каждого врача. Сейчас развитие современной медицины происходит чрезвычайно быстрыми темпами, а навыки и знания врачей быстро устаревают. В статье прослеживается внедрение последипломной медицинской подготовки в Украине на примере НМАПО. Выводы. Внедрение последипломной подготовки врачей в Украине изучается на примере более 100-летней деятельности НМАПО, что позволяет утверждать, что сочетание исследований и инноваций, обучения и медицинской практики позволило учебному заведению стать примером для подражания в учебно-методической деятельности в условиях последипломного медицинского и фармацевтического образования.

In Memoriam: Herbert L. Fred, MD (1929–2018)

As Accessible as a Book on a Library Shelf: The Imperative of Routine Simulation in Modern Health Care

In light of the present revolution happening in medical education in Japan as medical schools implement new curricula to conform to global standards, there is a growing demand for more internationalization and higher quality practical medical English education. In response, many institutions including governmental organizations, universities and academic associations are moving ahead with new initiatives to adapt to these changing demands. This paper reviews the current trends and innovations in medical English education in Japan. This paper also describes one initiative by the Japan College of Rheumatology (JCR) known as the JCR International School held yearly in Karuizawa. By examining recent trends and innovations in medical English education in Japan, the most relevant and applicable can be elucidated to illuminate a path forward for improved medical English education within the JCR.

Despite the General Medical Council emphasising the value of service users to medical students' education, there is scant literature about service user involvement in medical education. Although some research has outlined the effectiveness of service users as teachers, none has explored social issues surrounding how medical students learn 'with' rather than just 'about' service users. Incorporating insights from contemporary socio-cultural learning theory, this study examines the views and experiences of 47 stakeholders (comprising 19 service users, 13 medical students and 15 medical educators) concerning service user involvement in medical education. Eight audiotaped focus group discussions were convened and the audiotapes were transcribed. The transcripts and audiotapes were independently analysed by multiple researchers using Framework analysis. Seven content- and five process-orientated themes emerged from the analysis. Content-related themes included the costs and benefits of service user involvement in medical education and process-related themes included the use and function of humour and metaphor. In this paper, we focus primarily on the content-related themes. We discuss these findings in light of the existing service user involvement literature and contemporary socio-cultural learning theory and provide implications for further research and educational practice. We encourage educators to involve service users in medical education but only in a considered way.

State University of New York Upstate Medical University College of Medicine