Health Education England publishes new mandate

Source: Department of Health

Date of Publication: May 2014

In a nutshell: The Department for Health has published Health Education England’s mandate for 2014-15 Delivering high quality, compassionate care: developing the right people with the right skills and the right values. The mandate focuses on ensuring a more flexibly-trained workforce better able to deal with the changing nature of care and is about the skills of the whole healthcare workforce, not just doctors and nurses. There is also more emphasis on community-based care. You can see the full text of this document here.

Health Education England publishes new mandate

Source: Department of Health

Date of Publication: May 2014

In a nutshell: The Department for Health has published Health Education England’s mandate for 2014-15 Delivering high quality, compassionate care: developing the right people with the right skills and the right values. The mandate focuses on ensuring a more flexibly-trained workforce better able to deal with the changing nature of care and is about the skills of the whole healthcare workforce, not just doctors and nurses. There is also more emphasis on community-based care. You can see the full text of this document here.

Whole-body immersion. Using simulation to throw junior doctors in at the deep end

Source: BMC Medical Education

Date of Publication: May 2014

In a nutshell: Many medical students feel ill-prepared for the world of work when they start out on the wards. Simulation has been widely used in medical education but it tends to focus on one situation or technique at a time. Lecturers from Griffith University in Queensland Australia developed a multi-method simulation where junior doctors were exposed to several different situations. 45 students took part in the simulation while 39 were in the control group going to workshops and seminars but not taking part in the simulation. After a week the students who took part in the simulation scored 75% on a prescribing test, compared to 70% for the students in the control group and were much quicker (29.1 seconds vs 70.1 seconds) at starting cardiac compressions in a resuscitation-test scenario although by the second week of training the control group were as quick at this. At the end of the second week the students who had been through the simulation scored better on knowledge and reasoning tests, a further prescribing test and a paediatric-resuscitation scenario test. You can see the full text of this article here.

Trivial Pursuit™ – the microbiology version.

Source: Innovations in Education & Teaching International; Jul2014, Vol. 51 Issue 4, 389-399

Date of Publication: July 2014

In a nutshell: Lecturers are always looking for ways to liven up their teaching and make it more interactive. Given the popularity of board games it’s perhaps surprising that more people haven’t incorporated them into students’ classes. Lecturers at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa did just that and developed a board game called Med Micro Fun With Facts (MMFWF) based on Trivial Pursuit™. The game was developed to stimulate medical students’ interest in microbiology and expose students to the subject content of an infections module in an informal, yet healthily-competitive way involving ‘active group dynamics.’ The game wasn’t formally evaluated in this study but having watched the students play it the lecturers themselves were impressed and concluded that it had the potential to ‘enhance students’ learning experiences.’