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Education is one of the core things that we do in our ICUs. It matters. One day, it might be us in that bed and at very least we want to know that the doctor or nurse making the decisions about our health and management knows what they are on about.
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Educating our trainees also has a multiplicative effect. There is a finite number of patients that we can treat in our careers. Each of our trainees will treat their own cohort of patients. And those trainees will also hopefully in their turn teach future trainees.
So we should make an effort to get it right.
How do we know if we are good educators?
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Thankfully this is just the question that Anand “Swami” Swaminathan, Simon Carley and Natalie May discussed on the iTeachEM podcast.
They talk about the values of information transfer, inspiration, peer review and educator ranking amongst other topics and try to dissect what really matters in being a good educator.
Listen to their podcast here: Are You a Good Educator? (Recorded June 2014)
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Once you’re done, there is another good podcast on the iTeachEM website that is worth listening to for some tips and insights that might help the next time you have to run a procedure teaching session.
Mack Moayedi gives a great talk on how to set up for success when teaching procedures. Listen to the whole talk, but here are the key steps:
1. Preparation (duh!) – Prepare the material, the learning environment, the patient and the student
2. Conceptualisation – Work through the procedure, indications, contraindications, expected outcomes and potential complications with the learner.
3. Visualisation – Have the learners watch the procedure, either by demonstration or using a video.
4. Verbalisation – the learners should be able to talk through the procedure from start to finish, describing each step and its expected outcome
Steps 2 – 4 should be done in advance of turning up to do the procedure for first time learners when the session is planned. They can still be done for opportunistic in-situ learning, but if there are obvious significant gaps in the person’s knowledge, perhaps this is one they get to watch but not do.
5. Performance – Guided performance of the procedure by the learner with the teacher by their side for support and redirection as needed.
6. Feedback – Early, honest feedback, highlighting good performance and areas for improvement.
Mack’s talk is here: Teaching Procedures-the Moayedi Way (Recorded Feb 2014)