Medical Education Podcasts 2012

LUCAS: a theoretically informed instrument to assess clinical communication in objective structured clinical examinations - Christopher D Huntley interview

Explores the factors that underpin faculty members’ decisions regarding the feedback they give to residents after directly observing them with patients and the factors that influence how feedback is delivered.

Dr Sigrid Harendza discusses the ways in which medical teachers select patients for bedside teaching and tried to determine the factors that affect patient selection.

Historically, assessments have often measured the measurable rather than the important. Over the last 30 years, however, we have witnessed a gradual shift of focus in medical education. We now attempt to teach and assess what matters most. In addition, the component parts of a competence must be marshalled together and integrated to deal with real workplace problems. Workplace-based assessment (WBA) is complex, and has relied on a number of recently developed methods and instruments, of which some involve checklists and others use judgements made on rating scales. Given that judgements are subjective, how can we optimise their validity and reliability?

Education is a complex intervention which produces different outcomes in different circumstances. Education researchers have long recognised the need to supplement experimental studies of efficacy with a broader range of study designs that will help to unpack the ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions and illuminate the many, varied and interdependent mechanisms by which interventions may work (or fail to work) in different contexts. The third State of the Science special issue, published each January, features a paper by Geoff Wong (Centre for Primary Care and Public Health, Blizard Institute, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK), Trisha Greenhalgh, Gill Westhorp and Ray Pawson entitled: ‘Realist methods in medical education research: what are they and what can they contribute?’ Read the paper: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2923.2011.04045.x/abstract