New publications as of October 29th, 2021

Read on for full summaries of our newest articles. 

Major Contributions:

Learning needs of family physicians, pediatricians and obstetricians to support breastfeeding and inform physician education by Krista Baerg et al. identified potential learning topics to address common breastfeeding concerns. While they identified latch assessment and delayed lactogenesis management as the top two priorities, they found that all of the topics were important considerations for continued physician education.

Enseigner en situation de pandémie : La transformation de l’enseignement et de la supervision clinique by Dubé and team documented the main changes that have occurred in the teaching of family medicine since the onset of COVID-19 through to adaptation to the second wave. They presented the issues encountered in our care and teaching practices during this time.

Educators and practitioners’ perspectives in the development of a learning by concordance tool for medical clerkship in the context of the COVID pandemic by Marie-France Deschênes et al. developed a learning by concordance (LbC) tool as a response to the decrease in clinical experiences due to COVID-19. They maintained that since the LbC tool is a new training method, further research is needed to refine their understanding of such a tool.

“Get the DNR”: residents’ perceptions of goals of care conversations before and after an e-learning module by Leora Branfield Day and team previously developed an online learning module for teaching residents a standardized patient-centered approach to goals of care conversations. They explored whether this module would mitigate the pressures of the “hidden curriculum” - the implicit set of expectations that contribute to the culture of medicine.

Black Ice:

Developmental Evaluation: six ways to get a grip on the potential of education scholarship to serve innovation by Kathryn Paker and team addressed the need to support students and faculty during a time of crisis. They offered six practical tips to use the Developmental Evaluation framework within medical education for the implementation of innovations forced by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Five ways to get a grip on the shortcomings of logic models in program evaluation by Betty Onyura and team outlined some limitations to logic models- such as neglecting to identify adverse outcomes caused by the interventions. They provided five strategies—including recommending efforts to revisit and revise logic models as contexts changes—to help educators mitigate the shortcomings to logic models.

You Should Try This:

Jessica DeWitt and team, in Engaging medical education scholars with a Twitter conference on professionalism and professional identity formation, described the first Twitter-hosted conference in medical education: “Peering into the Looking Glass”: Professionalism and Professional Identity Formation in Health Professions Education (HPE)” (#MCGConf2021PIF). They found that Twitter was an affordable and easily accessible option for medical education conferences to supplement in-person events.

Commentary and Opinions:

Incorporating sustainability, eco-responsibility, and educational equity in the medical curriculum by Ana Hategan and Mariam Abdurrahman suggested ways to minimize the environmental impact of quality healthcare such as using a digital medical curriculum when possible and reducing unnecessary procedures. They maintained that physicians have the opportunity to take on a leadership role within communities by promoting sustainable medical practices.

In their commentary, The importance of specialty experiences for Canadian medical student career exploration, Huo and MacNevin provided suggestions for how medical schools could increase early specialty experiences in pre-clerkship training. They recognized that although their suggestions would require considerable financial and human resource investments, the efforts would improve specialty exploration and subsequently improve career satisfaction.

Canadiana:

Dr Alexander Augusta sought medical education in Canada but became a medical educator in America after the Civil War by Persaud and team acknowledged the need for Canadian medical education to teach medical trainees the history of racism within Canadian medical schools, and how that history helps explain current racial disparities. They cited the example Dr Augusta who fought racism more than a century ago.

Conferences:

Change processes to transform health professions education contains the abstracts from the medical education conference organized by the Educational Innovation Institute of the Medical College of Georgia, Augusta University on October 20, 2021. It was hosted on Twitter using the hashtag, #MCGConf2021CP.

Letters to the Editor:

In their letter Response to “Resident-as-teacher to provide multidisciplinary online medical education on Instagram,” Kassam and Shah supported Liu and Sharma’s use of Instagram as a teaching tool during the COVID-19 pandemic. They also offered tips for improving online engagement such as creating polls and quizzes.

Images:

In the image, A surgeon’s paintbrush, Luckshi Rajendran depicted a surgeon standing at an art easel holding a scalpel. Rajendran described the holistic and humanistic side of medicine as art – where the physician is practicing the art of listening, empathy, and trust.