JIAMSE News - 11/13/2007

Dear IAMSE members,

As a new and soon to be ongoing effort of The Publications Committee, I write to give you some highlights of recent articles in JIAMSE. If you are anything like me, you see the announcement of the publication’s availability and then you often forget to go back and take a look at articles that interest you. By sending out monthly recent article highlights, we hope to get more of you remembering to read JIAMSE content. It is a wonderful journal, an asset for all of us and a testament to our organization’s success.

Among the several Innovations in Medical Education in the most recent supplement (Vol. 17 2S) is the following – Medical Students Shadowing Nurses Promotes Changes in Attitudes and Understanding by Graseck, Muegge and Rothbaum at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The article describes preliminary observations from a 3-year program of placing first year medical students among nurses for a shadowing experience. Survey results suggest that the students come away with a better understanding of the nurse’s role in healthcare, an appreciation that patients will often more easily express concerns to the nurse rather than the doctor and insight into the interactions of doctors with other healthcare professionals. We all know that healthcare takes a team (or is it a village?), not an individual and this early exposure to other team members can only be a good thing. My mind started working as I read to think of ways we can foster more early interaction among our medical students and Physician Assistant students here at my school.

The Monograph in the same issue is great, entitled – Training Medical Professionals to be Educators: Developing a Certification in Health Professions Education by Miller and Greenberg at The University of Louisville School of Medicine - the article describes in detail the development and design of a certification program in medical education for busy professionals. As more and more of us, especially those of us in IAMSE, have chosen to focus energy on education, it is quite gratifying to see so much attention in so many different venues. In this article, the course descriptions and the comments from participants suggest a vibrant and useful program. As many more institutions and organizations look to develop programs to train better educators, articles like this one are especially welcomed.

Don’t forget – you can access these and other articles at www.jiamse.org and follow the links. Happy reading!

Dani L. McBeth, Ph.D.
Publications Committee Chair