Chief’s seminar: turning interns into clinicians

Abstract

Background: Recent changes in healthcare delivery have necessitated residency education reform. To adapt to these changes, graduate medical education can adopt a chief resident-led clinical curriculum. Chief residents are ideal clinical instructors, as they are recent graduates who have excelled in their residency programs. To effectively use the limited time available for education, chief residents can implement active learning techniques. We present a chief resident-led, small-group, problem-based curriculum for teaching first-year internal medicine residents, and provide preliminary data supporting the efficacy of this approach. Methods: The seminar consisted of 11 4-week modules. Week 1 was a team-based crossword competition. Weeks 2-4 were small-group, problem-based clinical reasoning sessions taught by chief residents. The program was evaluated via pre- and post-module multiple-choice tests. Resident satisfaction data were collected via self-reported, anonymous surveys. Results: Preliminary results revealed a statistically significant increase from pre-test to post-test score for 9 of the 11 modules. The chest pain, fever, abdominal pain, shock, syncope, jaundice, dizziness, anemia, and acute kidney injury modules achieved statistical significance. Additionally, resident satisfaction surveys show that this teaching approach was an enjoyable experience for our residents. Discussion: Our chief seminar is an evidence-based, clinical reasoning approach for graduate medical education that uses active learning techniques. This is an effective and enjoyable method for educating internal medicine residents. Because of its reproducibility, it can be applied throughout residency education.

Evidence-Based Crossword Puzzles for Health Professions Education: A Systematic Review

“…1. Included studies were from a diverse array of countries, including 14 from India [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23], 4 from the United States of America [24][25][26][27], 2 from Malaysia [28,29], 2 from Saudi Arabia [30,31], 2 from Oman [32,33], 2 from Iran [34,35], and one from each of Canada [36], the United Arab Emirates [37] and Palestine [38]. The sample size of the included studies ranged from 38 [10] to 425 [21].…”

“…Methodological quality varied with MERSQI scores ranging from 5.5 to 15.5 (mean score 10.1). The most common methodological limitations were studies being conducted at a single institution and utilising only cross-sectional or post-test-only methodologies [10, 12-19, 21-33, 36, 37], and a number of studies also had unclear response rates [13,15,16,19,22,24,28,30,31,34,36,37] (see Table 3…”

“…Eight studies fulfilled inclusion criteria that employed either single-group pre-and post-test analyses [16,17,19,23,24,27,37] or non-randomised two group studies [34]. Four studies presented data on the educational impact on test scores.…”

“…Four studies presented data on the educational impact on test scores. Three studies demonstrated an increase in test scores following the application of crossword puzzles [23,24,34], noting that in one of these, crossword puzzles were not the sole intervention [24]. One study did not show an increase in test scores following crossword puzzle application [27].…”

Social Workers as Workplace-Based Instructors of Alcohol and Drug Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) for Emergency Medicine Residents

“…Although peer-peer teaching may be a partial solution, clinical responsibilities detract from such interactions. 11 Incorporating dedicated interprofessional instructors who could teach skills to residents in the workplace may be a solution. For example, social workers and psychologists frequently have specialized behavioral intervention skills and are potentially less costly than physicians.…”