News

IAMSE – Call for Teaching Excellence Award Nominations – Due April 1

DEADLINE EXTENDED

Since 2007, IAMSE has honored member medical educators with two prestigious awards to recognize and promote teaching excellence and educational scholarship in the medical sciences. We now open the nominations for the 2018 Excellence in Teaching awards, which will be presented at the annual meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada in June.

The Distinguished Career Award for Excellence in Teaching and Educational Scholarship (formerly called the Master Scholar Award) recognizes an IAMSE member who has a distinguished record of educational scholarship, including educational research and dissemination of scholarly approaches to teaching and education. Candidates should be Professor, Associate Professor, or equivalent rank, or have demonstrated greater than 10 years of educational scholarship. Additionally, candidates must have a significant record of engagement within IAMSE.

The Early Career Award for Excellence in Teaching and Innovation honors an IAMSE member who has made significant contributions to the field in the short time they have focused their careers toward enhancing teaching, learning and assessment. Candidates for this award will be Assistant Professor or equivalent rank, or have demonstrated less than 10 years of educational scholarship.

Qualified candidates may self-nominate, or be nominated by an IAMSE colleague.

Details regarding each award, required application materials, and deadlines are found in the document linked here. All nomination/application packets must be received by Cassie Chinn (cassie@iamse.org) no later than April 1, 2018.

IAMSE Winter 2018 WAS Session 2 Highlights

In case you missed yesterday’s Webcast Audio Seminar (WAS) Session, here are the highlights of this session:

Generating Trust in Entrustment: an update from the AAMC Core EPA Pilot Group
Presenter: Kimberly D. Lomis MD
January 11, 12 PM EST

Goals of Webinar

  • Review the background of the AAMC Core EPAs for Entering Residency initiative
  • Summarize recent activities of the national pilot group
  • Review guiding principles for implementation
  • Introduce the EPA toolkits
  • Discuss areas of ongoing development & study
  • Can see the Core EPA Pilot Project at AAMC website

Core EPA Pilot Project Motivated by patient safety

Desired Outcomes

  • Competencies, which are trainable attributes of an individual
  • Milestones, which are the developmental trajectory of the individual
  • EPAs describes units of work
  • Entrustments for a task requires the synthetic application of multiple competencies at a specified level of performance (milestone)

13 EPAs that can be found at the AAMC website

  • History and examination
  • Differential diagnosis
  • Common tests
  • Enter orders
  • Document encounter
  • Oral presentation
  • Clinical questions
  • Patient handover
  • Interprofessional team
  • Emergent care
  • Obtain consent
  • Perform procedures
  • Safety and improvement

Targeting summative entrustments decisions for that class at graduation in 2019.

10 Medical Schools participated in the Pilot

Four Key Concepts in Implementation of EPAs

  • Entrustment

Dimensions of Trustworthiness

  • Knowledge and Skill
  • Discernment
  • Conscientiousness
  • Truthfulness
  • Assessment
    • Need to be able to assess the Resident in the “ clinical work place”
    • Digital Portfolios are necessary to assess
  • Curriculum
    • Organized and systems-based approach
  • Faculty Development needs include:
    • Various faculty roles will require differing levels of training regarding the EPA framework

Nine Guiding Principles are available on the AAMC Initiative Website

  • EPA Toolkits and “One-Pagers” are available at the website as well.
  • Toolkit Structure includes
  • FAQs
  • “One-Pager” Schematic for the specific EPA
  • Resources from AAMC’s DREAM repository
  • Bulleted list of Behaviors and Vignettes
  • Complete Physician Competency Reference Set (PCRS)

Resources

  • Faculty and Learners’ Guide
    Curriculum Developers’ Guide
    AAMC Core EPA Guides
  • AAMC Pilot Group recommendations: Guiding Principles

To subscribe to the AAMC Core EPA list serve, send a blank email to subscribe-coreepas@lists.aamc.org

For more information on the next session or to register, please click here.

IAMSE Winter Web Audio Seminar “Competency based education across the UME-GME continuum: the EPAC program”

Competency based education across the UME-GME continuum: the EPAC program
Presenter: Deborah Powell
February 8, 12 PM ET

This session will describe the Education in Pediatrics Across the Continuum project (EPAC) which is sponsored by the AAMC and initially funded by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation. In addition to describing the goals and structure of this educational initiative, the project’s assessment strategies and criteria for advancement to GME will be outlined. Project outcomes to date and ongoing work will be discussed as well.

For more information and to register for the Winter 2018 Audio Seminar Series, please click here.

#IAMSE18 – Registration Now Open!

We are pleased to announce that registration for the 22nd Annual Meeting of IAMSE to be held June 9-12, 2018 at the Green Valley Ranch and Resort, just outside of Las Vegas, NV, USA is now open!

At the annual meeting of the International Association of Medical Science Educators (IAMSE) faculty, staff and students from around the world who are interested in medical science education join together in faculty development and networking opportunities. Sessions on curriculum development, assessment and simulation are among the common topics available at the annual meetings.

Additional meeting details and registration can be found online at www.iamseconference.org.

We look forward to seeing you in Las Vegas!

IAMSE Winter 2018 WAS Session 1 Highlights

In case you missed yesterday’s Webcast Audio Seminar (WAS) Session, here are the highlights of this session:

Competency-Based Medical Education: Understanding the Principles
Presenter: Linda Snell, MD, MHPE, FRCPC, MACP
January 11, 12 PM EST

Goals of Webinar

  • To lay the foundation for future sessions in this series;
  • To outline reasons why we need to change our current education system, and how competency-based medical education (CBME) may address these
  • To define CBME and common terms that are used when discussing it;
  • To enumerate the 5 components of CBME
  • To describe models for implementing CBME across the continuum of medical education

Key terms:

  • Competency – the thing(s) they need to do.
  • Competent – can do all of the things.
  • Competence – does all of the things consistently, adapting to contextual and situational needs.

Why change our current education system?

  • Today’s medicine is changing in terms of the Profession, Patient and Public safety and access to care.
  • How can we as medical educators prepare physicians to be effective in this environment?
  • Competence drops over time and there are competency gaps.

Challenges of current education system

  • Modern Medical Education is based on time (fixed length of time) and not ability.
  • Trainees unprepared to move on
  • Tend to assess trainees outside of clinical setting.
  • Fail to fail
  • Overloaded or burden of faculty
  • Education not based on patient or society’s needs

Highlights of the Flexner Report

  • Need for fundamental redesign
  • Facts and concepts need to be taught, practiced and assessed in the context
  • Evaluation of learners must reach beyond knowledge to rigorously assess procedural skills, judgment
  • practice until an acceptable level of proficiency is attained
  • develop approaches to skills training that do not put our patients at risk in service to education

We need doctors who 


  • Are optimally prepared for practice
  • Can safely provide complex care
  • Can work and lead health care teams
  • Maintain / improve their competence in changing contexts
  • Possess skills and abilities beyond knowledge
  • Knowing > doing > being

We need medical education that 


  • Is based on explicit outcomes needed by graduates
  • Transparent to learners, teachers, assessors
  • Focuses on individual learner needs
  • Ensures physician competence increases over time
  • Teaches for competence, aims for excellence
  • Promotes life-long learning
  • Provides ‘right’ amount of time
  • Provides public accountability

“We believe that in the future, expertise rather than experience will underlie competency-based practice and
certification.”

Fundamental concepts of CBME

  • Education must be based on the health needs of the populations served
  • Primary focus of education & training should be desired outcomes for learners rather than structure and process of the system
  • The formation of a physician should be integrated across the continuum – UGME > PGME > practice

CBME principles

  1. Focus on outcomes: graduate abilities
  2. Ensure progression of competence
  3. Time is a resource, not framework
  4. Promote learner centeredness
  5. Greater transparency & utility

Milestones and EPAs

Milestone: 

A defined, observable marker of an individual’s ability along a developmental continuum that expresses the stepwise progression of expertise; ‘significant point in development’

e.g. Respond to patients’ non-verbal communication; use appropriate non-verbal behaviors to enhance communication with patients

Milestones tend to be:

  • Applied to a person
  • More detailed than competencies
  • Clear descriptions, explicit statements
  • Expected level of ability
  • Observable – link to feedback

Issues Milestones Address

  1. Progression of Competence
  2. Authentic Assessment
  3. Comprehensive Curriculum
  4. Faculty guidance
  5. Learner transparency
  6. Failure to fail

Entrustable Professional Activity (EPA): 

A key task of a discipline (profession, specialty, or sub-specialty) that an individual can be trusted to perform without direct supervision in a given health care context, once sufficient competence has been demonstrated.

EPAs Describes a task

  • Links competency to clinical context
  • Reflects a collection of different competencies as applied to the work of the discipline

Linking EPAs and milestones

  • Assessing unstable patients, providing targeted treatment and consulting as needed
  • Recognize medical instability
  • Address primary priorities of resuscitation (ABCs)
  • Perform a focused clinical assessment
  • Develop a specific differential diagnosis
  • Develop and implement preliminary treatment strategies
  • Identify the necessity and urgency of consultation for advanced care
  • Document clinical encounters to adequately convey clinical reasoning and the rationale for decisions
  • Communicate with the receiving physicians or health care professionals during transitions in care

Core Components of CBME

  1. Competencies required for practice are clearly articulated.
  2. Competencies are arranged progressively.
  3. Learning experiences facilitate the progressive development of competencies.
  4. Teaching practices promote the progressive development of competencies.
  5. Assessment practices support and document the progressive development of competencies.

Common competencies within the frameworks

  • (Clinical) expertise
  • Problem solving
  • Health advocacy / prevention
  • Communication skills
  • Teamwork / collaboration
  • Leadership and management
  • Teaching skills
  • Life-long learning
  • Critical appraisal
  • Professionalism

For more information on the next session or to register, please click here.

IAMSE Winter Web Audio Seminar “Continuity, LICs and Competency-based Education – 2018”

Continuity, LICs and Competency-based Education – 2018
Presenter: Molly Cooke
February 1, 12 PM ET

This session will describe the current state of Longitudinal Integrated Clerkships (LICs) in medical education in the US, including the variety of formats that incorporate longitudinally and integration in some degree. It will describe what we know about the outcome of clinical education in this format for medical students and emerging trends in LICs. Because of the audience, special attention will be paid to how issues and concepts in fundamental science can be addressed in the LIC format.

For more information and to register for the Winter 2018 Audio Seminar Series, please click here.

IAMSE Winter Web Audio Seminar “Integration, competence and expertise: Preparing learners for the future”

Integration, competence and expertise: Preparing learners for the future
Presenter: Nikki Woods
January 25, 12 PM ET

As medical education prepares for the shift to competency-based education, there is increasing emphasis on identifying and assessing the specific knowledge and skills needed for safe medical practice. However, putting this new understanding into practice is made complicated by perceptual/knowledge limitations of students and fundamentally flawed models of information processing and memory implicitly held by many teachers. This session will provide participants with basic understanding of core principles of memory, attention, categorization and expertise development drawn from the cognitive psychology literature. Participants will learn new ways to conceptualize their own expertise and better prepare their learners for the complexities of future practice.

For more information and to register for the Winter 2018 Audio Seminar Series, please click here.

IAMSE – Spring 2018 Webcast Audio Seminar Series Save the Date!

IAMSE is pleased to announce the Spring 2018 Web Seminar Series!

Integrating Nutrition and Wellness Instruction: Practical Applications for Health Science Educators

As a follow-up to our successful series on faculty and student wellness and resiliency and as a prelude to our annual meeting integrating nutrition and wellness education in teaching the health sciences, the 2018 Spring IAMSE Web Seminar Series focuses on specific examples of how schools have implemented programs to address these issues. The first session will feature presentations by Angela Cheung from the University of Toronto and Maryam Hamidi from Stanford who will describe the current status of physician nutrition, barriers to healthy eating by physician training and practice, and suggestions for awareness recognition of the importance of proper nutrition in the wellness of physicians. The second session will be presented by Nicholas Pennings from Campbell University who will highlight, from a practical standpoint, how a new osteopathic medical school implemented a longitudinal nutrition theme focused on obesity. The next session will be presented by Sian Cotton who will provide a detailed description of a highly successful center for the promotion of integrative health and wellness at the University of Cincinnati. The fourth session will be another paired presentation by John Yoon from the University of Chicago and Tania Jenkins from Temple who will highlight research focused on the moral and spiritual development of students over-time, conducted as part of the of the “Good Physician Project”. The series concludes with a presentation by Joe Shapiro from Beth Israel on promotion of student wellness using peer-support groups. This series will set the stage for our upcoming meeting and provide insight into implementation of these important curricular initiatives.

Sessions will be every Thursday at 12 PM Eastern Time from March 8 to April 5, 2018.

Registration is set to open in January. Please visit www.iamse.org for more information.

IAMSE Winter Web Audio Seminar “Generating Trust in Entrustment: an update from the AAMC Core EPA Pilot Group”

Generating Trust in Entrustment: an update from the AAMC Core EPA Pilot Group
Presenter: Kim Lomis
January 18, 12 PM ET

Dr. Lomis, on behalf of the national pilot group, will briefly review the background of the AAMC Core EPAs for Entering Residency initiative and will summarize recent activities of the national pilot group. Guiding principles for implementation will be elucidated, and areas of ongoing development and study will be discussed.

For more information and to register for the Winter 2018 Audio Seminar Series, please click here.

IAMSE – Call for Travel Award Applications – Due February 2

The IAMSE Conference Travel Awards support students or junior faculty to attend the IAMSE Annual Meeting. The amount of the 2018 Travel Awards will be $1,500, and is meant to cover expenses related to attendance at the IAMSE annual meeting in Las Vegas, such as conference registration, lodging, and airfare. Any IAMSE member who will attend the 2018 Annual Meeting is eligible to apply, though preference will be given to those submitting conference proposals for a poster or oral presentation abstract.

To be considered for the award, an applicant must submit the following items:

  1. A current CV
  2. A 300 word Personal Statement
  3. An abstract or description of the work, if applicable

Applications must be submitted via e-mail, in duplicate, to: brandi@iamse.org and steinj@upstate.edu by February 2, 2018.

Happy Holidays from the IAMSE Admin Team

From everyone in the IAMSE office, we would like to wish you and your family a wonderful holiday season!

The IAMSE Administrative Office will be closed on December 25-26, 2017 and on January 1, 2018 for the holidays.

We are truly grateful for the support you have provided to us at IAMSE and are greatly looking forward to what 2018 has in store!

IAMSE – Publications Committee MSE Article Review

Every month, the IAMSE Publications Committee reviews published articles from the archives of Medical Science Educator or of its predecessor JIAMSE. This month’s review is taken from the article titled, “A Scoping Review of Ultrasound Teaching in Undergraduate Medical Education.” This article was published as an open-access article in 2017 in Medical Science Educator. It is certainly an important contribution to the undergraduate medical education community. UGME is in a strong uphill curve with the topic of Point of Care Ultrasound Education (POCUS). To attempt a scoping review (and thank you to authors for clarifying a scoping vs systematic review) should be appreciated by all who are attempting to understand this curriculum component as required or elective or both. In addition, the authors organization of the extensive literature reviewed into 4 themes applicable to decision makers of curriculum designers makes the quantity and quality of the content accessible to the reader. Studies that met the inclusion criteria were sub-categorized under the following headings: those that described or evaluated an ultrasound curriculum, those that employed ultrasound as a means of teaching another topic in the curriculum (i.e., anatomy, physical examination, physiology, invasive procedures), those that investigated the learning curve of ultrasound education and those that employed adjuncts or peer mentoring to teach ultrasound.

The text discussion is supported with excellent figure and tables to further organize the large content uncovered in the review and is clearly communicated to the reader. The content presented under each theme allows medical educators to look at literature that fits their current developmental stage of planning and implementing a POCUS curriculum. Finally, I must congratulate the authors on addressing the weakness of POCUS education, assessment. We know for students’ assessment drives learning and we also want assessment for learning purposes. The lack of instruments and need for validation of existing instruments in UGME is essential for the field to move forward. This is a call to UGME researchers to take this recommendation forward and not only plan and implement POCUS curriculum but assure development of assessments is a strong objective. This is clearly supports further exploring the OSAUS scale reported on and its validity and reliability in UGME.

On a personal note as an educator I have heard and questioned the statement “the ultrasound machine is the new/modern stethoscope”. I know students like gadgets and they like this POCUS approach in their clinical education, as it crosses both anatomical and clinical sciences. To date, the data satisfies the lowest level of Kirkpatrick evaluation-user satisfaction. The medical education community must move assessment of trainees to learning and most important behavior change in the clinical care of patients and ultimately measure increased quality and decreased cost to patients and healthcare systems.