In our August 2016 Supervisor survey, one of the top needs many of you expressed was to keep up to date – both clinically and educationally.

In this edition, we cover papers on the safety of primary care, motivation, role-modelling and the practitioners most likely to have a complaint against them.

Read on!

Recent education, training and research articles of interest

Early predictors of need for remediation in the AGPT program

A swag of Australian medical education researchers have come up with what appear to be predictors of the need for remediation in training. The ECTV (External Clinical Teaching Visit) and CFET (Colleague Feedback Evaluation Tool) showed a significant association with the need for formal remediation later in training. Read all about it here.

Motivation in medical education – AMEE Guide

Pelaccia and Viau have produced a neat guide on this important issue. The guide contains helpful strategies that can be adopted to motivate medical students (and probably registrars as well). Get the guide here:

Role modeling

Two papers on this important issue for all you supervisors!

A paper by Amalba et al found that “the desire and willingness to work in a rural community combined with good communication and excellent inter-personal and leadership skills are attributes of good role models for medical students during a community-based education and service (COBES) rotation that subsequently influences medical students’ career choices and readiness to work in a rural setting”.

You can read the paper here:

A rather disturbing opinion piece by George and Green from Penn State College of Medicine uncovered some grisly findings from a ‘Comics and Medicine’ humanities subject. Fourth year med students were asked to create graphic narratives (comics) from their medical education experiences. A whopping 47% of those contained horror images and clinical mentors were depicted as devils, demons, cannibals and belligerent old men.

It’s an interesting article, read here:

How safe is primary care? Systematic review

This paper investigates the frequency of patient safety incidents in primary care and how often such incidents are associated with patient harm.

The result? 2–3 incidents for every 100 consultations/records reviewed (median).

The outcome? 4% of these incidents might be associated with severe harm (significant impact on a patient’s wellbeing including long term-physical or psychological harm or death).

The 3 most common categories of incidents? Administrative and communication incidents; diagnostic incidents; and prescribing and medication management incidents.

Putting in context: The estimated proportion of patient safety incidents in primary care is generally lower than the estimated 10% of people who experience events in hospital.

Read the review here:

Best paper award

The MJA carries the best story of the month for my money, particularly for all you proceduralists out there!

Before picking up that scalpel, kill the Midnight Oil or Cold Chisel album you may have had going in theatre and play Mozart or nothing at all, particularly if you are male.

I kid you not that the main conclusion of this paper by Fancourt, Burton and Wiliamson is:

“Rock music (specifically Australian rock music) appears to have detrimental effects on surgical performance. Men are advised not to listen to rock music when either operating or playing board games.”

Check it out here: