Medical Teacher

ISSN: 0142-159X (Print) 1466-187X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/imte20

Gut feeling: Can it be taught? Manon Jenkins & Lauren O’Donnell To cite this article: Manon Jenkins & Lauren O’Donnell (2015) Gut feeling: Can it be taught?, Medical Teacher, 37:8, 792-792, DOI: 10.3109/0142159X.2015.1042441 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.3109/0142159X.2015.1042441

Published online: 11 May 2015.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 153

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=imte20 Download by: [218.22.39.83]

Date: 05 November 2015, At: 15:57

Downloaded by [218.22.39.83] at 15:57 05 November 2015

Letter to the Editor

In response to this educational upheaval, the UM Doctors of Tomorrow (DoT) program was developed as a ‘‘pipeline’’ for Detroit students interested in the medical field. DoT students in their first year of high school (approximately 30 students per year) gain exposure to the medical field through monthly hands-on field trips to UM, longitudinal academic mentoring from medical students, and career development opportunities including volunteer experiences, physician shadowing and summer health internships. With Dr. Hibbs’ support, we were able to recreate his clinical diagnosis activity across ‘‘the pond’’ with a group of 20 DoT students (ages 13–16). Students were grouped into teams and tasked with diagnosing a theoretical unresponsive ER patient. They received an EKG, chest X-ray, blood/sputum culture and arterial blood gas measurement as evidence, along with basic guides on how to interpret these studies. DoT students critically worked through medical knowledge, collaborated and problem-solved as teams, and were enthusiastically engaged. The success of this activity enabled expansion of the curriculum into a three-part mini-course on developing clinical diagnostic skills for senior high school students. This cross-national experiment in implementing clinical reasoning education in low-resource high schools as a means of fostering students’ interest in medical professions bodes well for continued adoption across diverse cultures and communities. Elizabeth Yates, Jonathan F. Finks & Gurjit Sandhu, University of Michigan Hospital and Health Systems, Ann Arbor, MI, USA. E-mail: [email protected].

Declaration of interest: The authors report no declarations of interest.

Reference Hibbs SP. 2015. The diagnostic skills of fourteen-year olds. Med Teach 37(3):301–302.

Gut feeling: Can it be taught?

encouraged in clinicians, as it potentially forms the foundation to future evidence-based medicine. Furthermore, Biswas suggests that as individual experiences contribute to the development of intuitive clinical judgement; early exposure to such experiences should encourage its use and strengthen its reliability. This could be provided through: (i) As part of the final year of undergraduate teaching, medical students could be provided with cases that stimulate the use of intuition. Such cases should be drawn from actual experiences of teaching clinicians, where they themselves relied on their gut feeling. By completing these scenarios, students would not only have an opportunity to discover what their own personal response would be, but would also learn from the outcome of the real-life situation. (ii) Students could also receive intuitive teaching within the hospital setting, whereby clinicians would provide ‘‘bedside’’ teaching to encourage instinctive clinical judgment in patient management and diagnosis. If appropriate suggestions were made by the student, this exercise should make them more confident of their own gut feeling. Alternatively, feedback would be given in order to mature their intuitive skills, well in advance of when they may be required to use them. In addition, supporting this teaching with a reflective learning portfolio would maximise learning from these experiences. We ourselves would like to receive this teaching within the medical school curriculum to enhance our intuitive ability as future doctors. Manon Jenkins & Lauren O’Donnell, School of Medicine, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK. E-mail: [email protected]

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the article.

Reference Biswas A. 2015. Gut feeling: Does it have a place in the modern physician’s toolkit? Med Teach 37(4):309–311.

Dear Sir We read with interest ‘‘Gut feeling: Does it have a place in the modern physician’s toolkit?’’ by Biswas (2015) who evaluates the importance of a clinician’s ‘‘gut-feeling’’ in clinical practice and suggests that strategies should be incorporated into medical teaching to develop this intuition. As undergraduates on placement, we are often impressed by a consultant’s natural intuition in the clinical setting and have wondered how these skills are acquired: is this intuition developed through growing knowledge or is it part of the individual’s innate ability. Biswas highlights the relationship between the practice of evidence-based medicine and intuitive medicine and therefore one could argue that as one is taught, the other should be nurtured simultaneously. Intuitive medicine should be 792

Evaluating assessment programmes using programme evaluation models

Dear Sir We read with great interest the insightful article entitled ‘‘Twelve Tips for programmatic assessment’’ by van der Vleuten et al. (2015). The authors have addressed the important issue of ‘‘programmatic assessment’’ and have eloquently provided concrete tips for its implementation. Development of a comprehensive competency assessment

Gut feeling: Can it be taught?

Gut feeling: Can it be taught? - PDF Download Free
354KB Sizes 1 Downloads 10 Views