Training students and doctors to deal with medical emergencies is problematic. Patients present sporadically at uncontrolled times. Learning by trial and error is unacceptable. In Anaesthesia and Surgery many of the core skills and emergency routines can be learned under direct senior supervision but the same is often not the case in Medicine. There is also a distinct gap between possession of knowledge and skills and their application: adequate knowledge in theory may not be translated into effective patient management. In order to address these issues a Medical Emergencies Teaching Programme has been developed for final year Medical Students and new‐start Medical Senior House Officers (SHO). This consists of a series of tutorials, skills stations and simulated acutely ill patient management scenarios which are filmed and used for debriefing. A Medical Emergencies Handbook has been written and provides the core materials for the course. Tutorials are all interactive and based on real cases. They are organized through the seven weeks of the student course and are condensed in the SHO 2‐day course. They include ‘Initial Assessment and Management of the Acutely Ill Adult’, LVF, shock, haemorrhage, anaphylaxis, acute coronary syndromes, respiratory emergencies, basic and advanced life support, prescribing drugs and talking to bereaved relatives. Practical skill stations run in the 2nd and 3rd weeks of the student course. These cover airway support, how to administer oxygen and nebulisers, rapid infusion, using monitoring (ECG, pulse oximetry, cuff BP), the cardiac arrest trolley, basic and advanced life support and defibrillation. Simulated patient management. Once the above skills have been learned the students then manage emergencies in real‐time as a team of four, with access to all of the equipment and communications they would have in an acute clinical area, working on a ‘low‐tech’ simulator. This is video‐recorded and a debriefing teaching session immediately follows the case. Scottish Clinical Simulation Centre. The final full day of the course involves real‐time emergency patient management in teams using a high fidelity clinical simulator with video‐recording and debriefing. Summary This course combines cognitive and practical training early. The core philosophy of the management of the acutely ill patient is emphasized and standard core material issued from the start. There is early inclusion of real‐time, hands‐on patient management using a ‘low‐tech’ system with video recording. These structured, sequential elements ensure that the students are familiar with the management of the acutely ill and with the teaching processes such that they gain maximally from the exposure to the high tech simulator. Feedback from the first 140 students completing the course has been unanimously positive. The next step is to evaluate the influence this teaching has on clinical management.

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There is evidence of gaps in knowledge, perception and self-assessed competence on reproductive and sexual health (RSH) issues of nursing students. A quasi-experimental study was conducted in Bangalore city between January 2017–December 2018 to study the impact of a capacity-building initiative for 1st-year nursing students on their knowledge, perceptions, self-assessed competence and resilience. Eight nursing institutions were selected purposively; initially, four were allocated randomly through lottery method to the intervention group (IG) and four to the comparison group (CG). Since one institution dropped out before the intervention from IG, another institution was recruited to replace this institution. Both, the IG and CG, had seven batches of students (three diploma and four degree) each. A sample size of 120 students for each group was required. An investigator-developed and validated survey was administered to both groups at the start (pre-test) and 18 months after the start (post-test) of the study to assess their knowledge, perceptions and self-assessed competencies. Resilience was measured at the end of the study using a standardised tool, 'The Child Youth Resilience Measure'. A capacity-building initiative (31.5 h) which was participatory, contextualised and integrated life skills, was implemented for the IG over a period of 18 months. A condensed version of the programme (13.75 h) was provided to the CG over the same period. The analysis considered a total sample of 625 students (IG = 294; CG = 331) that participated in both, the pre-test and the post-test. Nursing students within both groups showed statistically significant improvement in their overall knowledge scores from pre-test to post-test (P < 0.01). However, the difference in the overall knowledge scores of IG and CG (between groups) was not statistically significant at the post-test (P = 0.076). There was a statistically significant increase in self-assessed competencies on RSH within both groups from pre-test to post-test (P < 0.001), but no statistically significant difference was seen between the two groups at post-test (P > 0.05). There was no significant difference (P > 0.05) in resilience scores between IG and CG at the post-test. The study is limited in that it could not measure competencies in the real-world setting. The study shows that changes in perceptions would require more time and possibly more practice and experience. Nevertheless, even condensed versions of such capacity-building initiatives could improve the overall knowledge and self-assessed competencies of nursing students.

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