Research Roundup – April 2017

This month’s Research Roundup has a case of the warm and fuzzies as we explore resilience, burnout and engaging learners. Read on!

Writing an engaging discussion case

A great little 12-tips paper by Cohen et al that outlines how to write a case that will facilitate teaching, engage learners and promote discussion.

The 12 tips are:

1. Start with the end in mind
2. Identify the learner’s level of knowledge
3. Use active and colourful language to create realistic cases (no! not that kind of colourful language!!)
4. Describe symptoms the way patients present them
5. Present lab or radiographic data without interpretation
6. Don’t be a slave to chronology
7. Lose your patient to follow-up
8. Create challenges to elicit multiple diagnostic or treatment options
9. Avoid the answer
10. Allow exploration to direct the discussion through the case
11. Use missing information and distractors to provoke discussion
12. Prepare optional questions to probe students’ understanding.

That last tip is also a really effective technique to use during viva examinations and preparation for them.

Read the paper here:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0142159X.2017.1266315

Burnout and resilience in the health professions

Burnout and stress are major factors in losing workforce, particularly in the health professions. But in health, the impacts may be much wider-reaching due to the nature of the role.

This thoughtful paper by Krietzer and Klatt provides a range of tips to help cultivate resilience and wellbeing for the health professional.

It covers curricular innovations such as mind-body medicine skills and mindful resilience.

It also provides, of course, good reading for those feeling the signs of burnout and those who may have concern about colleagues.

Interesting, practical reading. Find the paper here:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0142159X.2016.1248917
Another paper on the topic of burnout by Maslach and Letter makes some interesting findings on the importance of civility in the workplace and how promoting and practicing civility can make a real difference in workplace civility and mitigate against burnout.

Please read the paper here, if you please:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0142159X.2016.1248918

Social network analysis in medical education

This is an interesting paper that delves into social network analysis to help understand the social processes underlying academic performance, workplace learning, policy-making and implementation in the medical education context.

The real interest is that it may help identify some of those unknown influences on medical students and doctors including the spread of behaviours and attitudes – otherwise known as the hidden curriculum!

Read on:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/medu.13152/pdf

Empathy

And let’s finish off with a touch of empathy. This paper by Ekman and Krasner throws empathy under the microscope of neuroscience and finishes off by identifying the skills, competencies and training that will help develop it and maps those against the ACGME and AAMC training program curricula. Could the AMC follow?

Table 1 at the end of the paper is a terrific resource in itself. Well worth a read.

But I do understand you are pressed for time…

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0142159X.2016.1248925