Introduction Bedside teaching has long been a time-honoured component of medical education, and this was emphasised by Sir William Osler, father of modern medicine who once said, “To study the phenomena of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study without patients is not to go to sea at all.” While utilitarian arguments have been used to justify such training, deontologi...

OBJECTIVE To assess the quality of toilet facilities available for disabled people in a large provincial teaching hospital. DESIGN Survey of toilet facilities for patients on the wards and in the outpatient department. SETTING Teaching hospital in Leeds. RESULTS Although the quality of toilet facilities varied, none met the standards recommended by the British Standards Institution. The w...

Emergency medicine (EM) is defined, in part, by clinical excellence across an immense breadth of content and the provision of exemplary bedside teaching to a wide variety of learners. The specialty is also well-suited to a number of emerging areas of education scholarship, particularly in relation to team-based learning, clinical reasoning, acute care response, and simulation-based teaching. Th...

Knowledge in history-taking has increased rapidly over the last twenty years. Currently the principles to be taught include "conduct," "content," and "diagnostic reasoning." However, inattentiveness of medical schools, reluctance of busy faculty to be involved, and increasing enrollments have resulted in difficulties in teaching these skills. Studies have shown a beneficial short-term effect of...

Cardiac arrest victims who present with pulseless electrical activity (PEA) usually have a grave prognosis. Several conditions, however, have cause-specific treatments which, if applied immediately, can lead to quick and sustained recovery. Current teaching focuses on recollection of numerous conditions that start with the letters H or T as potential causes of PEA. This teaching method is too c...

The authors present a four-step model of debriefing as formative assessment that blends evidence and theory from education research, the social and cognitive sciences, experience drawn from conducting over 3,000 debriefings, and teaching debriefing to approximately 1,000 clinicians worldwide. The steps are to: 1) note salient performance gaps related to predetermined objectives, 2) provide feed...

One hundred patients on four general surgical wards in a large teaching hospital were interviewed about the information they had received about their illness and what they had been told about the investigations they had undergone. Fifty-five of them expressed some dissatisfaction and 14 were strongly dissatisfied. The way in which ward rounds were conducted was heavily criticised, but most pati...

RESULTS: 148 survey responses were obtained. 66% of respondents were male, and 33% female. 86% were from integrated programs. 60% were PGY level 1-4, while 40% were senior residents or fellows. 74% of respondents prefer teaching faculty to be flexible based on resident input and intraoperative events when planning for a surgical case. While 82% prefer informal didactic teaching, with a clear se...

Education Centre, Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, University of Western Australia, Nedlands, WA. Fiona R Lake, MD, FRACP, Associate Professor in Medicine and Medical Education. Department of Respiratory Medicine, Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital, Nedlands, WA. Gerard Ryan, MB BS, FRACP, Respiratory Physician. Reprints will not be available from the authors. Correspondence: Associate Professor F...