Professional Development in Medicine

This resource, written by world leaders in the field of evidence-based pain treatments, acts as a simple guide for people who wish to make sense of evidence in a healthcare setting and who want to avoid being misled by faulty evidence. It provides practical guidelines on how to make sense of and interpret the evidence that is available, with information on how to avoid straying beyond evidence into conjecture, supposition, and wishful thinking. It covers size, trial design, harm as well as benefit, and health economics and management evidence.Less

The OSCE forms the practical part of educational and professional medical examinations and is often challenging and expensive. Deconstructing the OSCE takes a fresh approach to passing OSCE exams, teaching how to tackle the exam in a new way. It doesn't provide checklists of information needed for specific OSCE stations; instead it helps to develop generic strategies and skills that will lead to success in any OSCE exam, regardless of specialty or level. Featuring advice, practical tips, real life examples and exercises, this resource will prepare candidates with the skills to prepare for effective OSCE study and strategies for overcoming common psychological hurdles and baggage. It also explores how to overcome past failures in the OSCE by overhauling previous study routines and suggesting new strategies for the road ahead. Less

FRCS Trauma and Orthopaedics Viva offers a unique approach to this high stakes exam, from the team behind the highly successful Oxford revision course. Based on the principle that viva candidates improve their technique by observing and learning from others, the author team have created a best-practice formula for dealing with the individual scenarios. Set out in a simple format, viva topics are introduced by an initial clinical photograph, radiograph or diagram, followed by sets of questions with the suggested answers on the next page. Less

This invaluable guide to the GPVTS supports trainees from the process of application, through to qualification and beyond. The author is a recently qualified general practitioner, and she combines a frank and friendly approach with a wealth of insider knowledge to guide trainees through each stage of the training process. It not only features real-life case studies from those in training or who have recently completed training, but also gives handy hints and tips on how to avoid some of the common trainee pitfalls.Less

This online resource presents a non-formulaic approach in how to write a grant, and helps those interested in grant applicants to anticipate questions and concerns the NIH may have during the selection process. It how the NIH operates at the corporate level, as well as the culture and policies of individual institutes and centers, how the NIH budget evolves over the course of a fiscal year and why the timing is important, customizing NIH Web site searches and using the data to increase chances of success, and identifying appropriate program officers, study sections, and funding opportunities. It also provides advice on developing each component of the grant application in order of the components' influence on the final impact score and reviews individual funding mechanisms along with grantsmanship tips specific to each, as well as the importance of reviewer-friendly formatting and organization of the text. It also discusses the next steps after the application has been submitted–before, during, and after the review and funding decision. Strategies for resubmitting or repurposing applications are provided for those who do not receive awards, and it also addresses the needs of those who do receive funding but have questions on managing and maintaining their award.Less

Each year, thousands of junior doctors apply for highly competitive training jobs in a variety of specialties. Obtaining a training job can be a difficult and stressful process, with some specialties attracting 40 applicants per post. This resource is a wide-ranging, accessible guide to the application process, covering every step, from online application to the selection panel. It includes essential tips on career development, interview technique, and specialty-specific advice.Less

Good teaching skills are essential for passing on knowledge so that it will be retained and practised for a lifetime, and thus, being able to teach well is vital to patient care. This resource is for the busy clinician to help improve their teaching and pass their skills and learning on to others in the most effective way, and covers every aspect of teaching, from lesson planning and how to use resources, to evaluating teaching and dealing with difficult situations. A combination of practical advice, step-by-step instructions and sample lesson plans will help and inspire the reader to become the best teacher possible.Less

Physiology is the science that is applied at the boundary between life and death; this is why it's so important to those of us who tread that same boundary every day in the practice of anesthesiology and critical care. The functional difference between a patient who has just died and one who is still alive is physiology. What the heart, lungs, and circulation do in life is best understood through some simple, unifying principles of mechanics and chemistry. But that is not enough. There is also a way of thinking about these concepts that helps pull them together. Interestingly, that form of logic is almost identical to the way our brains work when we are solving logic puzzles. To that effect, brain teasers are included at the end of each chapter.Less

The use of simulation-based education has become widely embedded in almost all areas of healthcare. Medical educators have enthusiastically accepted the range of techniques offered by simulation to enhance, supplement, and excite learners at all levels of their lifelong education. This manual outlines the principles and practices of simulation that have application to every level of healthcare education. Its role in supplementing traditional educational techniques, as well as introducing newer methodologies for learning, assessment, and research, are included. In this second edition, all chapters and the glossary have been updated to reflect the changes in our understanding of the optimal use of simulation. The authors have generously included their own suggestions, tips, examples, and even programme outlines to help you get started. Finally, new chapters that focus on patient safety, interprofessional education, and intensive care medicine have been introduced. This may be the only healthcare simulation book you will ever need.Less

This resource offers theoretical and practical guidance for those planning, delivering, and receiving education and training in ever-changing healthcare environments. Themes covered include assessment, professionalism and medical regulation, educational standards, patients' expectations, Continuing Professional Development, leadership and management, the European Working Time Directive, Fitness to Practice, interprofessional learning, the development of the NHS workforce, equality and diversity, and ethical and legal issues.Less

Providing a comprehensive and evidence-based reference guide for those who have a strong and scholarly interest in medical education, the Oxford Textbook of Medical Education contains everything the medical educator needs to know in order to deliver the knowledge, skills, and behaviour that doctors need. It explicitly states what constitutes best practice and gives an account of the evidence base that corroborates this, and features over 150 illustrations to help communicate complex educational theory quickly. It covers topics including curriculum, identities in medicine and social context, delivery, supervision, the stages of medical education, selection and dropout, assessment, quality issues, scholarship and research, medical education in emerging and developing markets, and the future of medical education. Describing the theoretical educational principles that lay the foundations of best practice in medical education, this resource gives readers a thorough grounding in all aspects of this discipline.Less

Physician Communication: Connecting with Patients, Peers, and the Public presents the current world of physician communications, from face-to-face and digital communications to public speaking and traditional media. The book explores methods and explains guidelines of exceptional physician communication. Physician–patient communication is, after all, human-to-human communication; establishing a bond and listening are just two of the essential elements in building trust and understanding—the foundations of communication. But today there is much we need to learn when it comes to facilitating the exchange of information, providing psychosocial support, ensuring shared decision-making, translating complex information, resolving controversies with sound science, and the myriad of goals we have as physician communicators with patients, peers, and the public. While most of our communication is with patients, we increasingly find ourselves communicating with family members, caregivers, students, residents, colleagues, patient advocates, researchers, insurance agencies, bosses, board members, the public, and even at times journalists. What we are communicating, where we are communicating, and with whom we are communicating are continually changing and expanding—and with ever more electronic technologies available to us, from electronic medical records and emails to online forums, video conferencing, and other high-tech systems. All of this makes how well we communicate as physicians even more important to our success in today’s healthcare environment.Less

Research Methods in Health Humanities surveys the diverse and unique research methods used by scholars in the growing transdisciplinary field of health humanities. Appropriate for advanced undergraduates but nuanced enough to engage more seasoned students and scholars, this volume is an essential teaching and reference tool for health humanities teachers and scholars.Health humanities is a field united by its commitment to social justice; it recognizes the importance of applying expertise to real-world concerns and of creating research that translates back in meaningful and useful ways to participants and communities. The chapters in this field-defining volume reflect these values through research approaches to examining the human aspects of health and healthcare that are critical, reflective, textual, contextual, qualitative, and quantitative. Divided into four sections, the volume demonstrates how to conduct research on texts, contexts, people, and programs. Readers will find research methods from traditional disciplines adapted to health humanities work, such as close reading of diverse texts, archival research, ethnography, interviews, and surveys. The book also features transdisciplinary methods unique to the health humanities, such as health and social justice studies, digital health humanities, and community dialogues. Each chapter provides learning objectives, step-by-step instructions, resources, and exercises, with illustrations of the method provided by the authors’ own research. An invaluable tool in learning, curricular development, and research design, this volume provides a grounding in the traditions of the humanities, fine arts, and social sciences for students considering healthcare careers and also provides useful tools of inquiry for everyone, as we are all future patients and future caregivers of a loved one.Less

How does having a baby fit in with a medical career? Along with the problem of finding time to actually have a baby and coping as a pregnant doctor, there is the problem of finding information when it is most needed. This resource discusses pregnancy and motherhood for medical students and doctors, and is written by an author who has faced the joys and frustrations of combining medicine and being a mother.Less

Teaching Health Humanities expands our understanding of what health humanities teaching currently does and what it could do. Its contributors describe the variety of degree programs where they teach, the politics and perspectives that inform how they teach, and methods for incorporating newer digital and multimodal technologies into their teaching practices. Each individual chapter lays out the theory that drives contributors’ teaching, then describes how it happens in practice at the broad level of such matters as syllabus design and at the finer level of lesson plans, class exercises, and/or textual analyses. In the middle section, contributors focus on how they integrate critical race, feminist, queer, disability, class, and age studies in their courses, with essays that exemplify intersectional approaches to these axes of difference and oppression. The last section includes chapters that illuminate how to teach about digital technologies to reveal the often obscured politics in their design, as well as descriptions of courses that bridge bioethics and music, medical humanities and podcasts, health humanities filmmaking, and visual arts in end-of-life care.Less

Each year, roughly 18,000 medical students graduate from 170 plus medical schools in the United States. Nearly all of these graduates will continue their medical education at one of the more than 1,000 teaching hospitals across the country. Because of the reduction in the resident work week and the more recent intern shift cap, medical education on the wards must be high yield. This educational responsibility falls on the shoulders of attending physicians, few of whom have had formal education in teaching. This book utilized an in-depth exploratory, qualitative approach to uncover how a group of attendings, identified as experts in the field of medical teaching, construct learning environments that promote team-based learning while delivering high-quality patient-centered care. We observed attendings with their teams on rounds and conducted interviews and focus groups with the attendings and current and former learners in order to obtain multiple perspectives on what makes an attending a great teacher and clinician. Using real examples derived from the inpatient teaching environment, this book will provide readers with strategies they can modify and incorporate into their own teaching repertoire, including how to utilize the expertise of other allied health professionals and involve the patient in the teaching process.Less

Training in Surgery follows the Intercollegiate Surgical Curriculum Project and reflects the new surgical specialty training curriculum in a clear and concise style.