Faculty Bibliography

Web-based online course (Virtual Patient). Users will be required to complete a registration form on the NYU website before gaining access. Registration is free but is restricted to full-time teaching faculty or administrators affiliated with a recognized educational institution. This online course will provide useful information and tools to address patients' psychosocial responses to terrorist threats or attacks, to help focus responses of health care teams in acute situations, and to fulfill leadership roles in communities. The modules emphasize the most common psychosocial stress responses to bio-terrorism and disasters: Acute Stress Disorder; Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD); Depression / Bereavement; Sub-Diagnostic Distress

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) educators are often confronted with learners who use their new critical appraisal skills to dismiss much of the medical literature. Does this cynical attitude of "clever nihilism" affect educational outcomes, such that educators need to tailor their curricula to these learners? The authors proposed that this critical skepticism may be an intermediate developmental stage for EBM learners as they progress from "naive empiricism" to "mature pragmatism" and sought to observe its effect on educational outcomes from an intensive, 6 week EBM course. In this course, fifty-four medical residents reported significantly improved skills in critical appraisal and electronic searching. However there was no association between a measure of clever nihilism and the self-reported educational outcomes. The role of clever nihilism in the EBM classroom remains a potentially important issue, and its lack of effect here may be a product of several methodological limitations addressed in the discussion. Such a construct requires further validation The question remains as to whether such cynicism is a learning style or a developmental phase.

Medical residents, frontline clinical educators, must be competent teachers. Typically, resident teaching competence is not assessed through any other means than gleaning learner's comments. We developed, evaluated, and integrated into our annual objective structured clinical examination a resident teaching skills assessment using 'standardized' students. Faculty observers rated residents using a customized 19-item rating instrument developed to assess teaching competencies that were identified and defined as part of our project. This was feasible, acceptable, and valuable to all 65 residents, 8 students, and 16 faculty who participated. Teaching scenarios have potential as reliable, valid, and practical measures of resident teaching skills

BACKGROUND: Residency programs must prepare physicians to practice in the current health care environment. This mandate is reflected in 3 of the 6 competency domains now required by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education: systems-based practice, interpersonal skills and communication, and practice-based learning and improvement. SUMMARY: An invitational conference was convened, with experts in clinical practice, managed care administration, and education to identify and recommend optimal and promising assessment methods for 4 target areas: physician-patient communication, ethics, teamwork and collaboration, and practice management. Working in small groups, participants considered a range of resident assessment methods and identified current or future methods for each area, based on reliability, validity, use of behaviorally oriented outcomes, feasibility, and cost. Preferred methods of assessment varied by domain and include written examinations, computer-based patient management problems, standardized patients, objective structured clinical examinations, portfolios, 360-degree evaluations, and patient satisfaction surveys. CONCLUSIONS: The use of several practical, scientifically sound, and specific methods for assessing residents' competency in care management are recommended. Assessment instruments will need to be flexible enough to adapt to the rapid changes in the health care delivery system and terminology